Mark Mehaffey | No Limits

Mark Mehaffey finds satisfaction and success exploring multiple mediums and styles

By Gussie Fauntleroy

Mark Mehaffey, Late Winter Reflections, acrylic, 24 x 24.

This story was featured in the July 2016 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art July 2016 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

Mark Mehaffey used to jokingly say he was a schizophrenic painter, using the outmoded term for someone who couldn’t settle on a single personality. In his case, he had no desire to choose one medium or even one style—and still doesn’t. But these days he uses a more politically correct phrase and calls himself a compartmentalized painter. The various “compartments” in his artistic repertoire are not absolute, however. Elements from one technique or style frequently flow into the others—creating only loose divisions between his impressionistic landscapes or cityscapes in acrylics, representational scenes in transparent watercolor, and mixed-media nonobjective works.

The single common element in all of Mehaffey’s art is water. He’s been exploring the creative horizons of water-based paints since receiving a children’s watercolor set at age 10. Looking back—he’s now 65—he sees that water is also central to the one continuing passion that began even earlier in his life: fishing. At age 5 he started fly-fishing with his family in Michigan streams, and these days, he heads out to the state’s lakes from his home in Williamston, just east of Lansing. In fact, fish are a recurring motif in Mehaffey’s abstract paintings, symbolizing the forward flow in life. For the artist, that flow was a double stream for almost 30 years as he pursued parallel careers in teaching and studio art until retiring from the classroom in 2002. It was a challenging time whose exacting need for self-discipline is reflected in his dedication to long hours in the studio today—and in the awards and personal satisfaction that have accumulated as a result.

As he relates the decisive boyhood events that led to an obsession with painting, Mehaffey reveals a self-assurance and sense of humor that no doubt served him well while teaching art in Lansing’s inner-city public schools. The son of a dentist and a registered nurse, he diverged from the family interest in public health—his sister went into dentistry—and turned instead to art. His first watercolor set was a gift from a fourth-grade teacher, and his parents also encouraged his enthusiasm for art. “I suspect it was meant to keep me out of trouble,” he says, smiling. “It worked—more or less.”

Mark Mehaffey, Into the Light, watercolor, 30 x 22.

That first paint set coincided with another pivotal experience. One day he walked through the home of a friend whose father was a watercolor painter. On the walls were numerous paintings, and the father’s studio was crowded with works in process, brushes, and paint. For Mehaffey, it was a revelation. “I was spellbound. I can still see it in my mind,” he remembers. “It just amazed me that someone could represent the world in paint. I know my mouth was hanging open, and I stood stock-still and stared for a long time. From that moment on, I was an artist.” After that he would sit alone in his room for hours at a time, gradually working out how to match the colors he saw around him with those in his eight-color set. The following year, when he received a 16-color set that included black and white, he thought he’d passed through the gates of paradise.

In high school Mehaffey took an art class or two, was involved in sports, and generally did not put effort into becoming the straight-A student his sister was. But drawing and painting came naturally, and whenever he was at home, it’s what he did. At one point he thought he might parlay his artistic talent into an architectural career. “But then someone told me I would need to do math,” he says ruefully. He was good with people, though, which led to teaching. At Michigan State University he earned an education degree and a bachelor of fine arts with honors, with a focus on painting and printmaking and a minor in psychology—handy for dealing with kids. Then he returned to his own former high school as an art instructor. Over the years he also taught in elementary and middle schools.

All along, Mehaffey spent virtually all of his free time painting. He took one day off at the beginning of each summer and after that (when he wasn’t fishing) spent 12 to 14 hours in the studio almost every day, every summer. During the school year he painted on weekends. His work was in galleries, and he took part in exhibitions and activities as a member of regional, national, and international water-media societies. “I was exhausted all the time,” he says. Still, the studio time provided a rich opportunity for exploring seemingly endless combinations of subject matter, styles, and mediums, expanding out from transparent watercolor into gouache, acrylics, and mixed water media on a variety of surfaces.

Mark Mehaffey, Morning Walk, West, acrylic, 12 x 12.

In 2010, Mehaffey was one of two dozen American painters selected from hundreds of entries worldwide for the Shanghai Zhujiajiao Watercolor Biennial, the first time the exhibition was open to artists outside China. His entry was honored with one of 15 awards presented by the show’s jury. As a result, Mehaffey spent an all-expenses-paid week traveling in China, and his winning painting was purchased for a museum collection in Shanghai. He and his wife, Rose Marie, returned to China for more than two weeks in 2015 when he was invited to take part in a plein-air event and museum show, at which one of his paintings was also purchased. Other awards over the years have included a Best of Show from the San Diego Watercolor Society, the M. Grumbacher Gold Medal Award from the Allied Artists of America, and a Silver Medal of Honor at the American Watercolor Society Annual International Exhibition.

These days Mehaffey keeps a clockwork-regular schedule. He rises early at least five days a week and makes the short commute to his studio over the garage. He gazes out the studio windows at the gardens and trees of his five mostly wooded acres. Then he turns to the first of multiple paintings he’ll be working on that day. The studio is equipped with two large wooden easels for painting in acrylic on canvas or board, two drafting tables for water media, and three folding tables for working flat with mixed water media. Mehaffey continually moves between paintings—having two to five in progress at any one time—letting his work on one piece dry as he focuses on another.

If it’s a Wednesday, early morning will find the artist, his wife, and their standard poodle, Keshi, out for a walk on the semirural roads near their home. Mehaffey carries a portable easel and acrylics and stops when a potential painting catches his eye. He paints quickly, returning home with works like APPROACHING STORM. After a night of thunderstorms that continued to threaten, the morning’s dynamic atmosphere was reflected in the vitality of rapid brush strokes and intense hues. “There was an energy I liked because I thought I would get hit by lightning at any minute,” he quips, recalling the experience.

Because Mehaffey taught himself to use watercolor and other media, he developed his own ways of handling paint. Soon he found himself more interested in employing these skills to convey an emotional response to a subject, rather than create a direct rendering. Borrowing a term coined by an artist friend, he says he tries not to be “tragically literal” in his work. “It’s more about painting what’s inside of you and not just depicting what’s outside,” he says. The level of abstraction he employs rises and falls depending on what he aims to express in any one piece. Furthermore, every three weeks on his studio calendar is a day marked “play,” when he requires himself to paint in a way he hasn’t tried before. “So I do a lot of experimentation,” he says. He still does a lot of teaching as well, leading workshops around the country. He also frequently serves as a juror for invitational shows.

Mark Mehaffey, Pentimento Gray, mixed media, 26 x 20.

In recent years Mehaffey’s artistic exploration has extended into completely nonobjective imagery, which today makes up about 30 percent of his work. His Pentimento series comes from the art term referring to traces of a previous painting visible under a new one that has been painted over the top. In his case it’s an intentional process: He creates an abstract painting and then paints another one over it but leaves between five and 20 percent of the first layer visible. Sometimes he repeats the process several times, retaining small rectangles of each of the earlier layers in the finished piece. The compelling challenge, he says, is this: “If I have a huge canvas with a complicated image and I cover the whole thing except for a 2-by-3-inch rectangle, can I make that interesting? That 2-by-3-inch rectangle becomes eminently important.”

As he moves between abstraction and representation, plein-air painting and studio work, landscapes and urban scenes, and among diverse water media, Mehaffey finds that each approach enhances the rest. That’s a happy bonus, as is the fact that collectors and galleries are drawn to each kind, since this is the way he enjoys making art. “There are a lot of things I like to do with a paintbrush in hand,” he says. “I don’t want to limit myself. So I paint what I want to paint.”

representation
Lansing Art Gallery, Lansing, MI; Main Branch Gallery, Grayling, MI; C2C Gallery, Grand Haven, MI; Synchronicity Gallery, Glen Arbor, MI; Framer’s Edge Gallery, Okemos, MI.