Martin Mull: Hindsight
While illustrators like Norman Rockwell offer images of an impossible childhood utopia, other artists mine their childhoods for works that balance wish fulfillment with hints of nightmare. Martin Mull and Scott Anderson, two artists of different generations, both accompany their quests for an idyllic past with the recognition that it never really existed, pairing fantasy utopias with suggestions of the artificiality of any imagined paradise.
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Mull’s eight paintings at Carl Hammer draw on the images that impressed him in childhood: “matchbox illustrations, cereal boxes, Saturday Evening Post covers, the little ‘draw me’ guy from the Westport Famous Artist School ads. These were like promissory notes of the good life that I was not leading at the time, and my paintings try to reclaim some of the melancholy of disappointment.” Breakfast shows two smiling kids’ faces, spoonfuls of cereal about to meet their lips, floating disembodied at a disturbing nearly upside-down diagonal in the sky. The tilt and the illustrator approach duplicate some of advertising’s simplified dynamism, and though the image is odd, it has a cheery, even exaggerated optimism: these monumental heads float above an ordinary suburban home, based on a photograph of the house across the street from Mull’s as a child.
