Article by Debra Brehmer, Shepherd Express City Scenes, October 17, 2002
Mark Mulhern's Stubborn Commitment Several generations of Milwaukee artists might recognize the name Mark Mulhern. He’s been slogging away in the studio for 25 years now, stubbornly committed to painting, even through decades when the medium, lost its art-world allure.
At age 51, Mulhern is a beacon of light to aspiring painters. He is one of the few who have managed to continue making art (and making a modest living at it) through thick and thin. Most people give up, either in the twilight years after graduate school or sometime around their mid-30s when family responsibilities bring financial pressure.
Mulhern’s tenacity not only offers encouragement to younger artists, but actually seeps into the membrane of his canvases, It’s as if the years of his tenure in the studio have weighted his mark-making. Layers of personal history, studied sources, technique and plain finesse accumulate in the scoured gray backgrounds of his new paintings.
While it’s always exciting to see younger artists produce new work, it doesn’t quite compare to seeing a mid-career artist break new ground. And this is exactly what Mulhern has done in this new body of work, scheduled to go on view at Tory Folliard Gallery on Oct. 18 for Gallery Night.
I first saw a few of these paintings at Mulhern’s house several months ago. Although it was in the midst of a party I found myself mesmerized by these quiet little compositions of isolated figures on neutral grounds. They were so unlike anything I had seen of the artist’s previous work.
End of Disorder From the 1980s on, Mulhern had achieved some success with giant canvases of psycho-expressive disorder. This work neatly coincided with the heyday of neo-expressionist painting, in which young painters parlayed violently discordant images in a basically crude, emotionally raw manner—a type of bad-boy art previously championed in the 1940s by the abstract expressionists. Mulhern’s work in the 1980s was based on his deep involvement with Freudian psychoanalysis. In one of these seven-foot paintings for example, he is adrift on the couch, surrounded by associative snippets of images based on dreams, history and personal narrative. These 1980s paintings were chock-full of anxiety and made for engaging, but rather queasy viewing. You didn’t want to spend a lot of lime alone in a room with them. At their strongest, these paintings were the visualization of the human process of self-actualization through the examination and unsnarling of memory and sensation: art as a notebook and a metaphor for externalizing internal chaos.
But during the 1990s, Mulhern began drifting away from that form of self-examination. “I got better,” he says, chuckling. “I became healthier.” His paintings from this period were still large-scale and dependent on very active compositional spaces. But he began to erase, leaving silent space and obscured imagery where there once was drama. He spent a year living in New York City and says he found himself drifting from the edginess of German Expressionist Max Beckman over to the vibrant congeniality of Matisse during frequent visits to the Museum of Modern Art.
During this period, the monotype emerged as a chosen medium for Mulhern. A monotype is a single print made from painting directly on glass. For Mulhern, the process allowed him to isolate ideas and then develop these ideas in a series. He produced floral still-lifes, landscapes, self-portraits, portraits and illustrations of a Paul Bowles story. A monotype cannot be worked to death, like a painting. What you get is what you get, then you move on. Because there are fewer costly materials involved (such as oil paint), the monotype also lends itself to risk-taking.
More Immediacy Perhaps it was the immediacy of this process that ultimately enabled Mulhern to move into the sphere of his current work, which is the Zen apogee of his 1980s paintings.
Back in Mulhern’s living room, with the chatter of the party out in the backyard, these new paintings seemed like meditative little islands. Single figures emerged from rich but neutral grounds of pale gray, greens or umbers. While sometimes drawn from models, the paintings aren’t really specific enough to function as portraits. They deal in broader conditions, such as the language of gesture and posture expressed in everyday situations. Mulhern, observes how people stand in the grocery store line, how fashion models walk, how the way a friend carries himself defines who that person is. It’s an entirely silent world that Mulhern has cultivated, as if he’s turned off all the sound at a party and just focused on form.
During a recent conversation at his studio, he says he’s been looking at Pierre Bonnard, Georges Seurat (“La Grande Jatte” being the ultimate study of gesture), Alex Katz and Maira Kalman (the illustrator). Like Katz, Kalman and Seurat, Mulhern tones his work with a gestural light-heartedness. The isolated figures in his paintings are alone but not lonely. The mood is buoyant. Like Seurat, Mulhern’s style of sympathetic observation translates into a loving dishabille of everyday nuance. Characters emerge such as a guy throwing a bowling ball-part ballet, part explosive flailing of limbs. A man stands in a trench coat; a willowy fashion model is paired with a huddled refugee. Underlying the imagery is a game of push and pull, concealment and exposure. Some figures emerge from the soupy grounds, while others have been exiled into the gloam. It’s a metaphor for our own selective “seeing” process-what we allow into our focus and what we blur or don’t see at all.
All in all, these paintings simply sit well. I was much more inclined to spend my evening in the living room with these silent compositions than to join the fray of humans outside. It was their sense of focus that I found comforting. All the editing of sensory data had been done, and the viewer was left with the pleasant stillness of an observation translated into a refined moment. And perhaps that’s what middle age is all about. As Mulhern says, “Until 35, the psyche is constantly filling. Things keep flowing into you. After that, there is a need to order things and construct meanings. It’s not just about sensation. There’s a sifting and settling of images and thought.”
Click here to view works by Mark Mulhern.
William Nichols
