Daydream [1998], oil, 12 x 10. |
By Bonnie Gangelhoff
When Seattle, WA, artist Paul Mullally was a boy, his drawings revealed not only promise but also a glimpse at the man he would become. Among these early works are sketches of two vastly different subjects one of Auguste Rodin’s sculpture The Thinker and another of a slalom skier. “The Thinker isn’t half bad,” Mullally muses about his seventh-grade talents.
Today Mullally spends hours in his studio, seated like The Thinker with a paintbrush in his hand. And when he is not in his artist’s posture, mulling over a brush stroke, he’s likely to be on an adventure in a faraway land. An avid skier during his younger years, Mullally had an adventuresome streak that soon led him from the adrenaline rush of the slopes to the thrill of traveling around the globe.
“I’ve always loved the costumes and colors of exotic cultures,” Mullally says. “That’s the draw for me. Traveling to faraway places is an experience that is 180 degrees different from my everyday life.” The artist has trekked up mountains in Nepal, rowed down the Ganges River in India, and slept under the stars in remote villages in Afghanistan. Wanderlust has also lured him to Greece, Thailand, Malaysia, Iran, Libya, and Vietnam...
Featured in January 1999