Martin Mull: Paintings, Drawings, and Words (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Mull, a well-known TV and film actor and currently a cast member of Roseanne, is also a serious artist who has exhibited widely in galleries and museums. His oils, watercolors and drawings portray disquieting domestic dramas, hovering between childhood dreams and adult dilemmas, that speak poignantly of the psychic costs of living in the modern world. In Milkman in Heaven, Drunkard's Dream, Alien, Christmas Eve, The Piano Lesson and other works, he sets up a cross-fertilizing dialogue among a few disparate objects at once familiar and strangely dislocated, viewed against largely blank backgrounds suffused with colored lights and shadowed surfaces. Mull's disarming visions compel viewers to look inward at hidden recesses of the self. The Chicago-born artist's informal autobiographical narrative complements 100 color plates.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 126 pages
• Publisher: Journey Editions; 1st edition (May 15, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1885203195
• ISBN-13: 978-1885203199
• Product Dimensions: 11 x 10.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,587,605 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Mull's other career, in his own words and pictures, September 26, 2009

By	M. Bromberg "BellemeadeBooks" (Atlanta, GA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

"Paintings Drawings and Words" is a large-format catalogue of Mull's work to 1995, accompanied by essays on art and work in his typically self-effacing style. Discussing originality, he has the smarts to quote Jean Cocteau ("One has to be very careful with originality or one may appear to have a brand-new haircut and a brand-new suit") and the honesty to claim "The Piano Lesson" by Henri Matisse as the single painting that has influenced his work.

When Mull, then a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, finally sees "The Piano Lesson" in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, he calls it a "confrontation rather than surprise encounter." After years of seeing the "postage-stamp sized reproduction" in art books, the original painting's size -- eight-and-a-half by seven feet -- made his knees go weak.

As a student, he was so impressed by its striking simplicity and color that it became "the perfect classroom" for what even Mull now claims was "an arrogant and ill-founded pursuit, doomed from the outset." Matisse's genius, he writes, was a learnable theorem that would reveal itself as a reward for diligence, determination, and patience. He's still learning; as for any artist, this is a lifelong personal challenge more than a criticism.

His most recent paintings evoke a 1950s suburban childhood, darkened with what one reviewer calls "feelings of loss, disconnection, and fear" -- exactly the emotions most children feel when they sit for an hour in front of a piano. It seems Mull has internalized the experience of "The Piano Lesson" after all, if not its genius.

For more about "Paintings Drawings and Words," visit BellemeadeBooks at blogspot(dot)com