Merrill Mahaffey: Sharing a Different Vision of Beauty

Sharing a different vision of beauty menin Mahaffey

Walk into a room with a Merrill Mahaffey wall-size landscape and a strange thing happens. Your feet stop but the core of you continues into the painting. You are enveloped, carried by impact into a dis-tant place inside yourself, into ancient knowledge of kinship with rock and water and majesty. When you leave, a sense of the grandeur remains with you. So do questions. Who is Merrill Mahaffey? Did he come full-grown into exis-tence as his gifts seem to have done? After viewing his Lake Powell paintings, the questions grew and demanded a visit to his studio not far from Phoenix College, where he still teaches part-time. A tall, slim man opened the door, pleas-ant face, early 40s, a native Westerner, partial to soft-voiced understatements, comfortably dressed in jeans, shirt, and running shoes. As we talked, he fed his Groucho Marx mustache not cigars but a scholarly pipe. The reason for his running shoes was soon evident. Mahaffey was almost con-stantly in motion, demonstrating his tools and his technique. His paintings develop in energetic but logical sequence from large stains of color, to coarse brush strokes, to small brush strokes. The result is an im-pression of fine detail and luminosity and head-turning communication. He talked about beginnings. “I think I've always felt that I had a different vi-sion of beauty, and I wanted to share that.” It took him 15 years to bring it into focus. “I grew up in western Colorado, rich not only in visuals but in gold and silver.” Big or small, rocks became impor-tant to Mahaffey. As soon as he could backpack into the mountains and into the canyons of the Colorado River, he did. “But at college they were talking only about abstract art. I said, yeah, but how do you paint a mountain? They said, don't worry about that. That's not real art.” So he concentrated on abstract landscapes until 1973 when a climbing accident broke both his leg and his ties to the thinking of others. A flash of insight told him, “I was prepared now to do what I wanted to do from the start—paint the country I'd

grown up in.” His sketchbook is filled with detailed color notes. He discussed the complex subject of light and color as he showed slides of his monumental paintings, then added, “Sometimes I simply make up a rich red or exaggerate an orange in order to convey the feeling of a place.” But not at Lake Powell. “Those sandstone rocks are really that red color.” He had never painted water before. “It's difficult to paint because wave patterns are never still. I had to learn to see move-ment and then turn it into something con-ceptual that I could apply to painting.” Rocks are still important to Mahaffey. “There's a spiritual quality to big rock formations,” he said. “Shaped by the ele-ments, they serve as monuments to the creative force which has brought all this together. For a time I was concerned about ART. Now I just hope when people view my paintings they leave with a new feelng for nature.” Never doubt it, Merrill Mahaffey, never doubt it.