ArtBreak with James Mullen 3/9/11

James Mullen did a nice job on his talk today.  I liked how he talked a little about the impact that UNH and the faculty here had on his artwork (I feel like most of the other art talks I have been to about the current Museum of Art exhibit haven't more than mentioned the subject).  He mentioned Craig Hood and Scott Schnepf, as well as a couple other professors before my time.  I was really impressed with the variety of media that he has explored in his years as an artist--how he began as an undergrad in printmaking and sculpture, later on got into painting, and more recently into photography.  That is something that I want to do.  Even right now, when I'm doing crafts and other things, I'll get really inspired by a certain material or technique and then do that for a while until I get tired of it and pick up something else.  

I quite enjoyed his landscape work.  I could really see his respect for and appreciation of landscapes and the environment.  Although some of compositions of his earlier paintings seemed a bit awkward, I liked how he incorporated both landscape and still life in order to look at man's relationship with nature--both how we view it and interact with it.  In the below painting, Nature, he really played with many different images of the landscape. 

James Mullen, Nature, 1998

His panoramic work was quite lovely, though for some reason I was a little disappointed when he told us that he projected photographs on his canvas, then traced the forms with charcoal, then painted the landscape.  I guess I just have it instilled in me from school that copying from photographs is somehow cheating.  

James Mullen, 17th Hole Spring Island, 2011

I liked the above piece a lot because he plays with the idea of man-made nature/landscape juxtaposed with natural landscape.  The little pond on the left is a man-made water feature for a golf course, the 17th hole of which is in the middle of the painting, while just off the golf course on the right is this great big salt marsh.  

James also talked a lot about his recent interest in photography, and how it really started when he purchased a digital camera and started taking photographs of everyday things whenever he saw something that interested him--this resulting in a lot of photographs of normal, recognizable objects, but from a unique perspective.  A lot of these also played with light and shadow.  I loved all the different oranges in the below photograph and the beautiful textures created by the netting and the shadows.

James Mullen, Chelsea Construction, 2004