Friday, June 9, 2006 | 7:44 a.m.
A collection of 44 Martin Mull paintings from 1980 to 2006.
Martin Mull is standing outside the Las Vegas Art Museum, smoking a cigarette, when a bright-eyed woman carrying a bag of books to the neighboring library stops and asks, "Are you who I think you are?"
Mull smiles.
"I used to watch you on 'Fernwood 2Nite,'" she continues. "Can I ask what you're doing here? I wish I had my camera."
Pointing into the museum, where a retrospective of his work opens Sunday, Mull responds politely: "I have an exhibit opening. This is what I've been doing for the last 25 years."
The woman, however, is insistent, more interested in Mull the actor, and she rattles off some of his movie and television credits.
It has become a common scenario for the artist whose comedy, acting and music career began while working toward his bachelor's and master's degrees in fine art at Rhode Island School of Design.
"It was all just a cabdriver's job to pay for paint," Mull says, adding that his art career would have been easier had he never been in front of a camera or microphone.
His credits fill seven pages, from stand-up to sitcoms ("Roseanne," "Arrested Development"), voice-overs ("The Simpsons," "The Family Guy"), movies ("Mrs. Doubtfire"), writing ("The History of White People in America") and albums, both comedy and musical.
Now, at 62, Mull the artist has an impressive resume. His works are in permanent collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. He's had a few dozen solo exhibitions and even more group exhibitions. Prominent collectors own his works, which range in price from $15,000 to $120,000.
Still, he says, the Las Vegas retrospective further helps get his "card stamped" as an artist.
"Adventures in a Temperate Climate," on display through Aug. 25 at the museum at 9600 W. Sahara Ave., includes 44 paintings that date from the 1980s, when Mull's photo-realistic airbrushed works would barely resemble the more narrative style that defines his current work.
But aside from those early works and a collection of sparse canvases with simple images that followed, the exhibit focuses mostly on depictions of postwar American "whiteness": idyllic middle-American suburban landscapes, vignettes of a seemingly perfect and innocent time when, Mull says, "there was this promissory note that 'this was what life was going to be.' "
In postwar America, he says, "there was the shallow, fictitious notion that the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant was the flag bearer of America. That disillusion is no less important or significant in the evolution of this country than the Alamo and Gettysburg in changing the face of this nation. It's just more gradual."
Inspired by 1950s illustrations, advertisements, cereal boxes, photographs and comics, Mull often uses images from old Look and Life magazines. He incorporates an occasional paint-by-numbers style and clip-art imagery. Amid the friendly images of Pollyannas, front yards, floral patterns and "dream homes" are looming shadowy figures, disconnected body parts, out-of-place wildlife, frightening cartoons and hints of danger, disappointment and loneliness.
"It's like putting a welcome mat in front of a haunted house," says Mull, who jokingly refers to himself as a "Saturday Evening Postmodernist."
In knocking on the doors of the now-nostalgic and glossy era, and peeking inside, Mull says he is "piercing the veil of WASP America" and capturing what he really sees: "human nature, disappointment, melancholy."
But instead of dramatizing the darkness, he insists that he's taking a wry, humorous and ironic approach to capturing this historic era. Additionally, Mull's work and its various approaches reflect the history of contemporary art.
Libby Lumpkin, consulting executive director at the Las Vegas Art Museum, says she has been following Mull's career for years and decided to offer him a retrospective last year when she saw a show of his new work at Spike Gallery in New York.
"I've always been impressed with his paintings," she says, "from the early photo-realistic phase ... to the pastiche paintings he's making today."
In her catalog essay for the exhibit, Lumpkin writes that when Mull "revisits the temperate climate of the heartland, he never ignores the plight of the real human beings trapped in the constructions of their own culture, or forgets where he's from." She groups him with those who see the Greatest Generation as "a chauvinistic, cruel myth."
"The Aerialist" (2004) features a young blond girl in a dress performing a high-wire act while prim, formally dressed adults look on. "Grafton Revisited" (2003) portrays another little girl balancing in the air above train tracks with dark trees in the background and a giant train headed her way.
While some works invite you to build your own story, others, such as "Homeland Security" (2006), are quite literal.
"In the event of a real disaster, we will all turn into clowns with buckets," Mull says with a smile while looking at the painting of clowns wandering aimlessly and holding buckets.
Of the man swimming away from his home in his flooded front yard in "Modus Operandi" (2004), and the 1950s family casually loading luggage into the car to the backdrop of a burning house in "The Importance of an Annual Vacation," Mull says, "It's the idea that every time it turns to sh--, it's time to get out of the house."
"Contemplation of Assets II" (2005), painted from a photograph of the street Mull lived on in Ohio, centers on a woman in black gloves and dark fitted suit reading a piece of paper.
"What is she reading? It could be a 'Dear Jane' letter," Mull says, "a grocery list. I don't want to know all of it. I want to keep it a visual phenomenon. If somebody has to get literal, so be it."
The oldest of three children, Mull says his dad worked as an acoustical engineer for the government and his mom was a homemaker and they lived "pretty hand-to-mouth."
Mostly, he says of his childhood, "It was kind of nothin'. It wasn't bleak enough to write a Hollywood script. I wasn't happy. I wasn't miserable. I didn't know any better."
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