Marty Mitchell of Saguache: Colors in Squares

Article by Ed Quillen

Local artist – December 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine

MARTY MITCHELL lives, paints, and draws in Saguache. But she grew up in Iowa, and she says that explains the unusual shape of her paintings: in a world of rectangular art, her works are square, just like the grid of section-line roads that defines the agricultural Midwest.

Her paintings are mostly landscapes, and they’re colorful — not in an exuberant or gaudy way, but with intricate layerings of softer tones. “The idea,” she says, “is to show people all the colors that are really out there when you look across the countryside.”

[Marty Mitchell]

So an unpaved road in the foreground isn’t just a pinkish-gray blur that one drives over on the way to someplace else. In her paintings, the distinct shades of road gravel emerge: salmon tones from shards of pink granite, hints of soft green, varieties of gray, bright mica flecks.

“It’s all there,” she explains. “But usually you don’t notice it. If there’s a goal in my painting, it’s to get people to pay more attention to what’s around them, and to learn to see all those colors.”

Mitchell just celebrated her 50th birthday. She grew up in Independence, Iowa, a town of about 5,000 between Waterloo and Dubuque. After her graduation from high school in 1968, she enrolled in the University of Iowa, from which she received a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting in 1986.

That’s 18 years for a result that is often attained in four, but Mitchell took 14 years off, from 1970 to 1984, to get married and have a daughter, Megan, who’s now studying actuarial science in graduate school. When the marriage faltered, Mitchell went back to school, and then to West Virginia University for her masters in fine arts.

[Marty Mitchell: Light Structure, Autumn #250 Oil on Canvas 14″x14″]

After that, one memorable job was as a summer intern at Fallingwater, the house near Mill Run, Pa., designed by noted architect Franklin Lloyd Wright. She helped photograph and catalog the inventory, and “even if that sounds tedious, it was fascinating.” For one thing, one of her co-workers was a bullsnake that lived in the chimney and was listed as an employee for rodent control.

She taught art at Fairmont State College in West Virginia, then at Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio, a town better known as the birthplace of astronaut and senator John Glenn.

Mitchell’s move west in 1991 was not the result of some conscious decision to seek the bright sunshine and clear skies of the high deserts north of Taos. There was an art-teaching position open in Alamosa at Adams State College, a step up on the academic ladder, and she got the job.

“Always before I had been drawn east from Iowa,” Mitchell recalls. “That’s where I went to grad school, and that’s where I taught.”

But the light, the colors, and the expanses of the San Luis Valley soon charmed her. The University of Iowa art program “is very strong on painting figures, and that was what I did. But as soon as I got out here, I became fascinated by landscapes.”

[Marty Mitchell: Light Structure, Autumn #244 Oil on Canvas 14″x14″]

Her landscapes are notoriously square. They seldom include prominent artifacts, other than an occasional road or telephone pole, and if there’s an old barn, it’s small and distant. There isn’t much sky, and the scenes usually include three distinct planes: foreground, middle, background, all equally sharp.

They aren’t detailed; they’re closer to expressionist. “I’m more interested in shape and color than in representation,” Mitchell explains, “and texture fascinates me, too. I really enjoy the physical act of layering the oils to create the variations in color.”

A Mitchell painting usually begins with a trip to the field with oil-pastel crayons. That results in a small work — which may be mounted and sold on its own — that she uses as the basis for a bigger oil painting.

“If you work from a photograph, you’re limited to the colors that Kodak provides,” she says, “and I want to work with the full spectrum. Plus, the wind and the shifting light and the bugs, they’re all part of the experience of being there, and if you missed that, it would show up in the art.”

MOST OF HER PAINTINGS are numbered parts of various series. Last year, she was examining the colors of snow. After she endured the predictable joking about yellow snow, she explained that “snow in the shadow isn’t black, it’s blue, but the blue can range from just a subtle hint to dark navy. Sometimes it’s purple. And it shifts as the sun and clouds move.”

There’s also yellow. “Look closely at any field, and among the plants, you’ll see hundreds of different yellows. I really enjoy trying to capture those.”

But green’s a different matter. “In ways, I feel intimidated by green. Maybe it’s because the green in the Midwest is so much more intense than the greens here, which are pale and subtle.”

Mitchell can tell you how the light of Alamosa differs from that of Saguache or Salida or the Carbondale area, where she spent some field days last summer. The higher the horizon line, the darker the sky, she notes, and the colors become more saturated.

Her landscapes may cover a lot of territory, but they’re not vast expanses. They’re interrupted by barriers, large and small — hedge rows, fences, tree lines, and eventually, mountains.

“It’s a reflection of my training,” she says. Not as an artist, but as a woman who grew up in the 1950s and ’60s. “Society imposed limits and barriers based on gender and role-playing, and that trained me to see barriers and limitations, even in landscapes.”

Thus her mountains serve as barriers, not as places to explore. The result is “a finite and bounded landscape, just like those section lines in Iowa. I don’t see a space that stretches indefinitely.”

[Marty Mitchell: Light Structure, Summer #167 Oil pastel 11″x11″]

Mitchell taught at Adams State until 1996, when she moved to Saguache to share a gallery and a house with potter Blair Meerfeld, who had also taught at ASC. They got married on Oct. 15 in Iowa, where they had a show. It continues through Christmas at Akar Archictecture & Design in Iowa City.

With the gallery in Saguache, she’s discovered that “paintings with cows or water sell best. I can barely keep them on the walls.” But “I haven’t let that determine my subject matter. I’m guided by the shapes and colors I want to work with, and if it sells, well, so much the better.”

Prices range from $175 for a small oil pastel on heavy paper to $1,400 for a 48″x48″ oil on canvas. She still teaches an occasional class, and offers workshops from time to time, but not all that often: “I really like having time to paint.”

The gallery with her paintings says Meerfeld Stoneware on the sign, and it’s about a block south of the Saguache County Museum on U.S. 285 in the town of Saguache. In the summer, the gallery is open reasonable hours. In the winter, it’s best to call ahead (719-655-2682) to be sure someone will be there.

Ed Quillen has been learning a lot about art since he started writing about artists for Colorado Central, but has no desire to replace Sister Wendy.