Sunset Storm

REFLECTION MADE VISIBLE The Art of Ed Mell

His studio is the grand sweep of the Colorado Plateau; the easel, the front seat of a Bell Jet Ranger or Hughes helicopter. The best way to view this country is to fly over, hover, and land on top, as Ed Mell discovered. The plateau from the air is a different world, with new landscapes, defined clear and sharp. Through flight, craftsmanship, and a selective eye, Mell's art echoes the plateau's laminated canyons, cathedral cliffs, and a variety of rainbow colors. From the helicopter, he gains a wideangle panorama of the vertical scale. Someone expressed it well: "There is as much country standing up as there is lying down." Canyon-cutting rivers meander in sweeping curves toward the receding skyline. Buttes and mesas lie scattered over the terrain. In places like Monument Valley, isolated rock spires reach skyward, standing like members of a fleet, ready to skirt alluvial slopes, and sail over the horizon. The plateau is done in Kodachrome. Traces of green and gray-piñon, juniper, sagebrush-scramble for a toehold on the bare rock. But the slickrock supplies most of the color. Multihued reds prevail, staining the soil, reflecting on translucent clouds, and joining watercourses draining the land. Ed Mell sees this. Even the deepest canyon shadow has half-perceived forms.

Sky-built clouds over the expansive land contain implicit shadows. Cloudbursts and sandblasting winds are dominant artists, creating a carved, sculptured wilderness done in sandstone. Relaxing in his Art Deco-furnished Phoenix home, Ed Mell talks about his art. At forty-two, he has a lean, sinewy build. Graciously polite, but with a ready wit, he jokes with wife Gail and helps their two young sons, Carson and Taylor, fix a model car. His brown eyes fill with excitement when describing helicopter adventures or a particular painting. They seem to search the horizon against the glare of a desert sun. Born in Phoenix, Ed Mell's roots go "Melodramatic skies, shimmering horizon, and the Hopi spiritual world convinced me," he recalls. "I wanted to become a landscape artist."

deep into Arizona. "My mother, Gertrude, came to Arizona in 1915; my father, Ed, in 1924," he relates. "They provided a supportive, encouraging environment for Arizona as a place and for art. "In my younger days," Mell continues, "drawing automobiles and anything mechanical was a consuming passion." This passion led to Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. After his graduation in 1967, he migrated east to New York City, becoming the art director of a top advertising agency. Two years later Mell started his own operation, Sagebrush Studios, along with another transplanted Arizona artist. "About this time, my airbrush illustration techniques brought some national Recognition. The Art Center training, coupled with illustration work, attracted me to the angular forms and simplicity of Art Deco and Moderne movements. Their discipline and strength, as I discovered, influences my design concepts in landscape painting. He missed the Southwest's open spaces after several years in New York's gray, vertical world. Restless, Mell spent the summer of 1971 on the Hopi reservation, teaching art to Hopi youngsters. "Melodramatic skies, shimmering horizon, and the Hopi spiritual world convinced me," he recalls. "I wanted to become a landscape artist." Mell returned to Phoenix in 1973, continuing to work at commercial art while painting part-time. In 1978, he entered the ranks of full-time landscape painters. In 1979, he met Jerry Foster, a helicopter pilot and news reporter at Phoenix's KPNX-TV.

"Sometime thereafter," Mell recalls, "Jerry offered me a seat on a three day helicopter trip to the Colorado Plateau." San Francisco Peaks, Painted Desert, Second Mesa, Hoskininni Mesa, Monument Valley, Marble Canyon, Echo Cliffs, Navajo Mountain. Ed Mell saw them-close up-names on the land. "An aerial voyage" he says, "shaping new visual perceptions of the plateau from top to bottom."

They continue to probe the plateau's outback, that intricate network of mesas and canyons encompassing the slickrock wilderness between Monument Valley and Lake Powell. They're often accompanied by Senator Barry Goldwater and Stan Jones, an authority on Lake Powell. Foster drops the red and silver helicop ter below rims of nameless canyons, hovers above corrugated mesas, and perches on wind-swept tops of great solitary buttes.

"This horizon to horizon drama, the indescribable fantasy," Mell explains, "is a bright, looming memory which somehow finds its way into a painting." Mell remembers places like White Mesa. Standing isolated on the Kaibito Plateau, northeast of Tuba City, the mesa's escarpments are visible for miles."

"On the mesa are two little-known natural arches; White Mesa Arch and Margaret's Arch, named by Barry Goldwater, the latter after his wife. Hovering around them is like viewing a lunar-like landscape in a little silver spaceship."

Mell's sketchbook is two 35mm cameras, equipped with wide-angle and telephoto lenses. Landscapes are recorded as they flow by the ship's Plexiglas window. He shoots up to a thousand photographs on a trip.

"They're viewed over and over," he explains, "then I select several for evocative forms and color. Behind their selection lies a question. How can I translate the experiences, and my reflections on them, into dramatic structures on canvas?" The photographs serve as visual ideas

For a quickly sketched pastel drawing. Once final size and composition are determined, the sketch is transferred to a gessoed canvas, landscape forms drawn with straight edges, and colors applied. Mell prefers the textural qualities of oil and indulges in color.

"I push the coloration, intensifying the plateau's ruddy, fugitive colors, searching for effective combinations to make a painting more powerful."

Mell simplifies paintings to bare-bones essentials, honing them to imaginative, selective fragments of the plateau's complex landscape. The images are recognizably three-dimensional, yet they're not profiles of the plateau any earthbound travelers would see.

"If anything," Mell observes, "my landscapes look like they could be built. Sometimes they're described as architec tonic. Images are refined to flat planes or structural forms by using straight lines and adapting the special design elements to them."

If painting is a language, less is more is Mell's syntax.

Something else, too. Human artifacts are absent in his work. Part of the attraction of the plateau is immeasurable space, the unmanipulated landscape. Writer Barry Lopez observed: "...space between discrete and distant objects (such as that between parallel mountain ranges), the deep silence, the constellations visible in the clear air above the desert constitute a unique landscape. The human spirit reverberates there, raises questions, imagines, ponders, and orders as it does in no other place."

If so, Mell's paintings symbolize the plateau's sense of aloneness, its wildness and solitude.

Ed Mell's art is an intuitive, personalresponse to the objective world of the Colorado Plateau. Artistic skill and powerful vision, united with the helicopter's magic, stamps his work as much as the plateau's landscapes.

"Painting is an individual, man-made gesture," he emphasizes. "For me, this requires interweaving experiences and creative imagination into the formal expression of my art."

The result: Monument Valley Storm,

Second Mesa Summer, Kings Throne, Edge of Rain.

Rust-red mesas, architectural cloud worlds, massive cliff facades. Crystalline simplicity presented with arresting directness. His signature on a picture seems superfluous.

Like other perceptive recorders of the Western landscape such as Ansel Adams and Maynard Dixon, his compositions are a way of seeing. Not just to see perhaps, but to reveal. Someone once remarked on Maynard Dixon's involvement with this land: "Where many looked, he was one of the few who have really seen." Include Ed Mell among the few who have seen.

Donald J. Hagerty is on the faculty of the American Studies Program at the University of California, Davis.

COMING YOUR WAY SEPTEMBER 1985 OCTOBER 1985

The name was first appended to a rag-tag mining community which once existed a dozen miles north of Ehrenberg. Today, it's Arizona's newest county. La Paz, Spanish for "peace," stretches in the sun along the eastern bank of the Colorado River, perfect for explorers, nature lovers, and week-end philosophers. Experience La Paz, in the November issue.

Meet an extraordinary cast of characters, from the Goldwaters to the wife of Wyatt Earp. The pioneer Jews in the Far West. They helped forge a frontier and shape the destiny of a new region. A colorful history of an unsettled land. In the September, 1985, issue.

The oldest living plant on Earth isn't the redwood or the bristlecone pine. It's the humble creosote bush. Some specimens may be as much as 11,700 years old. Marvel with us as we trace the origin and development of this lowly desert shrub, in the October issue.

NOVEMBER 1985 DECEMBER 1985

Light in darkness-from the glory of desert sunrise and lightning flash to luminarias and stained glass windows, from the glow on people's faces to mountains wreathed in majesty-that's the special theme for our spectacular holiday greeting card to the world, in the December issue.

SHARE THE ARIZONA ADVENTURE, start an Arizona Highways gift subscription. You can send 12 months of adventure to your friends and family with our special gift subscription offer. Order a one-year subscription at the regular $15 price, and each additional gift subscription is only $13. That's an $8 savings off the newsstand price. Call us today at (602) 258-1000 or write us at Arizona Highways, 2039 West Lewis Avenue, Phoenix, Arizona 85009.

Take Them Home

I've lived in Arizona all my life, and know it well. I've come to love our state through countless camping, hunting, and sight-seeing trips. Now the military takes us everywhere, everywhere except Arizona. So you can imagine how wonderful it is to be able to go home twelve times a year! Each issue takes us home to a place not matched by anywhere I've seen. Thank you again for your much needed scenic magazine.

Continuing Subscriber

I want to congratulate you on your sixtieth anniversary. I have been a subscriber since the late 1930s, and Arizona Highways is one magazine I would not wish to be without! I will be eighty-one years old in April, retired nineteen years, but still active and in good health, and will continue as a subscriber as long as I am able. Keep up the good work!

Desert Memories

Thanks for your January issue about the saguaro cacti. After having spent a year in Phoenix, I'm very thrilled by the saguaros, the gorgeous sunsets and the creosote bush smell in the desert.

One Can Hope

Amen to your March issue editorial regarding irresponsible advertising of offroad vehicles on national television. Perhaps some bold car manufacturer here or abroad will begin promoting offroad vehicle clubs and assisting in the development of man-made courses where these four wheel and dirt bike owners have true challenges which do no harm to the environment. And for those who truly wish an off-road adventure, ads will also stress the fragility of such places and the need for care and concern for Nature's beauty as well as historical treasures. One can only hope.

Artistic Compliments

After thirty years of reading Arizona Highways, I want to be one of the first of thousands to congratulate you on the March issue. The pencil drawings with so much character in them, the oil painting, and the photography were all splendid. Enjoyed the lore and legends also.

Concern and Displeasure

I read your editorial on the first page of the Arizona Highways March, 1985, and was so happy to hear someone stand up and voice concern and displeasure about our treatment of the earth and especially our wildlife and wilderness areas. I greatly support you and the way you back it up.

March Issue Quality

The various photos, paintings, sketches and articles, advancing through the years, are a delight and of much interest to one who is a relative newcomer to the magazine-from the early sixties. I have from time to time subscribed to magazines of other Western states, but never renew, as their quality can't compare with your magazine and are overloaded with ads.

Beautiful Memories

I enjoyed your April issue ("Sixty Years on the Road") as much as any because of all the different articles in it. I just couldn't put it down until I had read every word in it. Different writers brought back so many beautiful memories. Thank you so much for so many years of great pleasure.

Thanks from Poland

I am twenty-six years old, and I live in Poland. A while ago, I received one copy of your magazine from my friend in Tucson, and I want to thank you for the beautiful pictures and very interesting articles, although I have never seen your state.

I'd like to correspond with people interested in geography from USA and other countries. I thank you in anticipation.

Dead-Silence View

My childhood dream became a reality when my wife Sylvia and I came to America to...the Grand Canyon. This first deadsilence view brought tears to my wife's eyes. Surely this is one of God's greatest creations.

BOOKSHELF PANCHO VILLA AND JOHN REED: TWO FACES OF ROMANTIC REVOLUTION.

by Jim Tuck. University of Arizona Press, 1615 East Speedway, Tucson, AZ 85719. 1984. 252 pages. $16.95, hardcover.

We have all been warned not to judge a book by its cover. That same wariness should apply to titles. One might get the impression that John Reed and Pancho Villa shared an extensive interrelationship. But in fact, their blend was brief, when Reed went to Mexico as a correspondent for Metropolitan Magazine in 1914. Villa and Reed had little in common, including the Mexican Revolution. They were but two men marching in the same parade of thousands.

Author Tuck, a resident of Mexico and a journalist, brings much new material to light concerning our neighbor's problems in the beginning of this century. This revolution, like most, created enemies from friends, and regional warlords charging in different directions. Tuck does prove the point made by Nikita Khrushchev: "If you feed the people just with revolutionary slogans they will listen today; they will listen tomorrow; they will listen the day after tomorrow, but, on the fourth day, they will say, 'To hell with you!' Both Villa and Reed were revolutionists. Villa, a bandit, Reed, a scholar. Villa crowned his career as military governor of Chihuahua, where he compounded his previous atrocities by imposing wage and price controls. He was shot on the street in Parral, Chihuahua, in 1923.

After Mexico, Reed arrived in Russia in time to observe the revolution of October, 1917. Here he wrote his best known book, Ten Days That Shook the World. Under indictment for sedition in his own country, Reed at age thirty-three died of typhus in Russia and was buried at the Kremlin.

The author desperately tried to link the two men. Reed and Villa make a tough double for the best of pointed pens. Jim Tuck gave it his best shot, but his pattern was far too thin.

Photography by David Muench, Text by Patrick O'Dowd. Arpel Graphics, Inc. Available from Arizona Highways Books, 2039 West Lewis Avenue, Phoenix, AZ 85009. 1984. 155 pages. $40.00, hardcover. (Price includes postage and handling.) Shortly before his death in 1864, the petulant English poet Walter Savage Landor expressed what he believed to be the real values of life: "Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art." For the many who agree with that appraisal, David Muench has in this stunning publication given us the finest of those two great gifts. Muench is indeed America's master nature photographer and here, in 131 superb color photographs, are the untouched treasures of America's primeval beauty.

The scenes that Muench presents, from New England to the surf-sculptured coast of Oregon, are those places that have remained undisturbed, never violated by man's machines and urge to alter. Muench's artistry has captured the form, color, and character of what remains of America as America once was. All of America is here. Arizona is well represented. The last two pages encompass the nature of the state. The naked winter boles of aspen, standing stockade-like in snow. White on white. On the companion page, the friendly golden faces of Sonoran Desert poppies.

In his brief and often poetic text, Patrick O'Dowd, an American cultural historian, hones our awareness, citing the influence that our wilderness has had on the American character, and sadly, the insensitive stewardship many Americans have exercised toward their land. The content of this book is as varied and colorful as the unsullied spots it portrays; done by a master whose subjects are worthy of his talent. It is a book with more than just beauty, it has a strong spiritual flavor. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, certainly, there can be no infidels in a mountain meadow.

DAVID MUENCH ARIZONA WILDFLOWERS.

Text by Rodney G. Engard, Illustration by Erni Cabat. Cabat Studio Publications, 627 North 4th Avenue, Tucson, AZ 85705. 1984. 32 pages. $10.00, including shipping and tax. To the lovers of Arizona desert wildflowers this will prove to be a valuable little book. Illustrated with eleven exquisite color prints with popular, family and species names, and the basic anatomy of wildflowers, it will enrich the life of a desert dweller. Like most desert life, wildflowers too, are born because of winter rains. A wet winter and this delightful little book will make your next desert spring more exciting.

ARIZONA'S TREE SQUIRRELS.

By David E. Brown. Arizona Game and Fish Department, 2222 West Greenway Road, Phoenix, AZ 85023. 1984. 104 pages. $5.00, softcover.

The author, David E. Brown, is an experienced editor, writer, and publisher and holds degrees in wildlife management and geography. Arizona's Tree Squirrels will interest the amateur naturalist, mammalogist, as well as the weekend woods walker. The book contains a generous offering of photographs, maps, and charts, is well written, and has an adequate bibliography and glossary.

(INSIDE BACK COVER) Magnificent Lake Powell on the Arizona/Utah border. Navajo Mountain, sacred to the Navajo Indian, looms darkly in the background. The tribe calls the 10,416-foot-high mass Naatsis' san, "enemy biding place." Major John Wesley Powell, Colorado River explorer, had also given it a name, Mount Seneca Howland, in honor of companions killed by Indians. The latter name was not recorded. Gary Ladd photo