Ed Mell

Ed Mell’s style is sometimes compared to Maynard Dixon’s, and in his angularity and economy of form Mell sometimes seems to be modernizing the modernist Dixon, seeking to scout out Dixon’s essence, as it were. And then there are paintings like Vaulting Clouds, in which there is no trace of Dixon, no trace of W. R. Leigh, no vestige of influence, nothing of the art history of American Western Art. These “vaulting clouds” are vaulted, a vault lit from within, a fire lit cave mouth. The clouds dwarf what is surely a giant mesa, filling the sky—another vault—with their leaning, grasping fingers that will soon make an early night of fading day, and, perhaps, bring a hard, fast storm to the desert. If there is any trace of tradition in the painting, the viewer finds it in hints from, perhaps, the Hudson River painters, and, further back, in the swirling skies of an artist like J.M.W. Turner, though Mell’s edges are stronger and his shapes more clearly defined.

-James D. Balestrieri