Clark Mitchell | Stepping Out

Landscape painter Clark Mitchell expands his horizons with the sheen of metallic leaf

By Gussie Fauntleroy

This story was featured in the February 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art February 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

THE OLD BOX of Schmincke soft pastels, some of them broken but their colors still rich and intense, had traveled from Dresden, Germany, with Clark Mitchell’s father before World War II. For decades it sat in a drawer, almost forgotten. Now 15-year-old Clark gazed at it in his father’s hands as they stood in the basement of the family’s home outside Denver, the space where the elder Mitchell pursued his hobby of making furniture from wood.

Since Clark’s early boyhood, his parents had watched the growth of their son’s interest in art. He’d won drawing and painting awards in elementary and high school, spurred on by excellent art teachers. His father had driven him to a small art-supply shop in Denver, looking on as the boy excitedly picked out his first set of oil paints. At some point his father remembered the old box of pastels tucked away in a drawer. He pulled it out and handed it to his son, a casual gesture but monumental in its significance over the years. “In hindsight it was a seminal moment, although at the time I thought, well, great, thanks,” Mitchell recalls.

Little did he know that these colorful sticks of dry pigment, and many more like them, would become his daily studio companions and the means of expressing his deep appreciation for the outdoors and the beauty of the natural world. Now 69, Mitchell has followed his twin passions of art and nature over the years to such honors as Best of Show at both the Laguna Plein Air Painting Invitational and the Maui Plein Air Painting Invitational. He holds the designations of Master Pastelist in the Pastel Society of America and Distinguished Pastelist in the Pastel Society of the West Coast. Most recently, while continuing to work in soft pastel, he has expanded his oeuvre with a new landscape series in oils that incorporates shimmering copper and other metallic leaf.

WHILE HE couldn’t have known, as a boy, that painting would eventually become a successful, full-time career, Mitchell found himself in awe of certain artworks he encountered at the Denver Art Museum, which the family frequented when he was young. Among the exhibits that stand out in his memory was one featuring Impressionists, with their confident, loose brush strokes and remarkable use of color. Living in the Rocky Mountain foothills southwest of the city, the future artist’s trajectory was also influenced by magnificent views that included a man-made lake in the valley below, where he spent hours gazing at reflections in the water and cottonwood trees along the banks.

Then, at 17, Mitchell had the good fortune of taking part in a school-year-abroad program in Barcelona—a major metropolis filled with museums and extraordinary architecture never even imagined by a shy Colorado boy. The Barcelonan family with whom he stayed lived in “one of the most marvelous dwellings I’ve ever experienced: a confection built by an aide to [world-renowned Modernist architect] Antoni Gaudí,” Mitchell writes in a blog post about this experience. “Outside was a concrete wall with delightful and intricate natural-shaped wrought iron twisting atop; within the wall was a tiled, towered, Moorish-inspired edifice.” Inside the home, elaborately tiled floors and stained-glass windows took the teen’s breath away.

Then there were the museums in Barcelona, Madrid, and Toledo where he came face-to-face with original paintings by Picasso, Dalí, Velázquez, Goya, and El Greco, among other Spanish and European masters. “What a new world for a boy who’d been delighted simply by what the Denver Art Museum had to offer,” he says, smiling. “I had no idea at the time what an influence this exposure to such a variety of the world’s creativity would have on me. It really expanded my imagination.”

The experience spurred him to earn a degree in studio art from Colorado College in Colorado Springs and then to head west to San Francisco, where Mitchell studied at the Academy of Art College (now the Academy of Art University). The old box of German pastels traveled with him, as did a book on pastel painting by Santa Fe artist Albert Handell, a gift from his brother and sister-in-law. Soon he signed up for a workshop with Handell, the first of a continuing practice of attending workshops with acclaimed painters, among them Michael Lynch, Clyde Aspevig, Skip Whit-comb, and William Hook. “Each one really bumped me forward in both excitement about art and the potential of making a living with art, and in technical skills,” he says.

Another important career development came in the early 1990s when Mitchell’s work was shown at John Pence Gallery in San Francisco, which for 40 years was among the country’s premier realist galleries. About the same time, he made what he calls a “gentle slide” into full-time fine art, letting go the last of the landscaping jobs that had been augmenting his income and satisfying his lifelong love of gardening. In 1990 Mitchell left San Francisco and settled some 45 miles north in Sonoma County near the town of Cotati, where he still lives today. The location provides an ideal stepping-off point for plein-air painting along the rugged Northern California coast, in towering redwood forests, among nearby farmlands, and farther afield to such current favorite painting spots as the desert around Palm Springs.

Mitchell’s hillside home, which he shares with his husband, Ron Roudebush, offered the perfect place to design and build his dream studio after years of makeshift workspaces, including a garage and a converted chicken coop. Combining Craftsman and Southwest styles with touches of Mediterranean influence, the structure has 2-foot-thick straw-bale walls and organically rounded features. An 18-foot-long, heavy-gauge wire grid along one interior wall serves as a multi-painting “easel” of sorts, allowing the artist to have as many as a dozen small pastel pieces in process at once. Meanwhile he may be working on two or three oils on traditional easels, as well. Not long ago he added several freestanding art-display panels to the studio, enabling him to invite collectors for viewings and to participate in open-studio events.

WHILE MITCHELL’S collectors have long admired his beautifully executed landscapes in pastel and oils, his own excitement is clear as he talks about incorporating metallic leaf into his work in oils. The idea emerged a few years ago when he decided, almost impulsively, to attend a workshop at the Petaluma Art Center on applying patinas and metal leaf to turned-wood platters and bowls. “I didn’t know why I took the workshop or how I would ever use it,” he says. “I asked if I could use it with paints, and the instructor said, of course.”

For a while Mitchell was slow in putting the new materials to use, since the metallic leaf adhesive was toxic and required a respirator, rubber gloves, and plenty of ventilation. Then, a couple of years ago, he discovered a water-soluble adhesive. A whole new creative avenue opened up, often involving subjects he has painted for decades but with a subtly contemporary twist. RED VINES, for instance, was inspired by a Napa Valley vineyard long familiar to the artist, reimagined with areas of copper leaf. “I liked the bold composition and the wild—for me—colors, the movement of the eye through the scene, and the majestic quality of the eucalyptus trees,” he says.

In this and other “leafscapes,” as he refers to them, the painter also moves into a more contemporary aesthetic by outlining major shapes within the composition. In MT. DIABLO AND THE DELTA, the edges of trees and mountain contours beyond a body of water are delicately augmented with a dark maroon line, while the water and clouds remain soft-edged. Copper leaf applied over the paint appears to glow in the evening sky and in the sheen of the water’s ripples. As with all the works in this series, any shift in the angle of view or the quality of light results in dramatic changes in the metallic leaf’s color—from quiet browns to burnished bronze or gold hues—and thus in the mood of the piece.

When he first began the leafscapes, Mitchell hesitated about diverging from his previous path. “I kept dreaming about it: Should I really do a series of this? I’m a traditional landscape painter. Do I dare to really step out?” The answer asserted itself in the energy he experiences at the easel. After completing more than 30 leafscapes in the past year, he says, “it still feels new—I’m really excited about exploring this.” Down the road he also envisions adding chemical patinas to the leaf to further alter its effect.

Gazing out over the grassy hillside and “wonderful, paintable views” in every direction from his rural home, Mitchell reflects a moment on his gratitude at having such a place in which to work, as well as for viewers and collectors who share his excitement with what he’s been doing over the years. “I’ve always been fortunate that what I love to paint, other people love as well,” he says. “I’ve never shied away from what I think are beautiful paintings.”

 

This story was featured in the February 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art February 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

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