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An M&M of a different flavor

© Christine Hamm

The Piano Lesson, by Matisse

Martin Mull
Bad poets borrow; Good poets steal.
T.S. Eliot
I was struck by the eerie beauty of Martin Mull's pale, surreal and primitive paintings several months ago when I was saw a book about him in a used book store. Unfortunately, I didn't have the money to buy the book until recently. Once I started reading and realized how rich and thoughtful his work is, I knew I would have to write about him. In my investigations I came across quite a few surprising facts about the artist, which I will reveal at the end of this piece.

Martin Mull got his training in painting from the Rhode Island School of design. He has said that everything else he has done in his life has simply been to support his painting. His work and aesthetic theory are fascinating in that they spring from the study of a single painting by Matisse: "The Piano Lesson".
When he was young, Mull became obsessed with this piece, and if you examine each of his paintings carefully, you can see how each face depicted is an echo of the player in Matisse's painting. Mull states that "The Piano Lesson" showed him a whole new way of looking at painting, that a kind of flatness and distorted spatial effect can be more visually satisfying than classic perspective and "realistic" painting.

The work that followed this epiphany is very two dimensional and the background is often filled with a grainy smoke. The figures, miscellaneous objects and unnamable shapes floating in the canvas space have very little relation to each other. He said he often bases his paintings on dreams and they do have that dream-like, time-warped and distorted quality. Some of the visuals that reoccur in Mull's paintings are the praying figure, a person falling, and heads put on incorrectly or missing altogether. All his paintings seem to have a child-like, melancholy quality, as if the artist is trying to recall some happy moments from childhood, but can't quite get the details right.


He has stated that many of his painting are about middle America's feeling of betrayal and disillusionment after the promises of the squeaky clean 50's. He gets much of his visual inspiration from the process of painting -- drawing, painting on the canvas and checking it, then scratching it out and painting over it until the mistakes and erasures become an integral part of the work. They are a palimpsest of the process of the painting. Mull says he know when a painting is finished because it clicks for him; every image seems to fall into a special harmony with every other one in the space.

The copyright of the article An M&M of a different flavor in Contemporary Art is owned by Christine Hamm. Permission to republish An M&M of a different flavor in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.