S.C. Mummert | American Dreamer

S.C. Mummert conjures glamorous, idealized images of western life

By Norman Kolpas

She sits astride the airborne bucking horse like a 1930s American dream come to life, her hair cropped short in an insouciant style reminiscent of flyer Amelia Earhart’s. Wearing jodhpurs, a crisp white shirt, and a crimson neckerchief that flies upward as the steed’s forelock and tail also do, she firmly grasps the reins with one hand while her other helps maintain balance, thrusting out her Stetson at arm’s length. Bright sunlight limns her torso and head, as well as the horse’s contours, endowing the image with the rich glow of an unforgettable memory.

This 4-foot-square oil painting by S.C. Mummert, FLYING SOUTHWEST, captures in lifelike yet flawless detail an essential image that seems as if it has emerged fully formed from our national consciousness. It possesses an aura of realer-than-real perfection that may well bring to mind American painters of the past century like Norman Rockwell, whose works regularly graced covers of the Saturday Evening Post, or Haddon “Sunny” Sundblom, whose Christmastime ads for Coca-Cola indelibly fixed our collective vision of a plump, rosy-cheeked, happily smiling Santa Claus.

Yet Mummert’s paintings also simultaneously express a sensibility that belongs very much to the present day: Consider them within the context of the tribulations now facing the world, and they take on a singular, and much-needed, sense of clear-eyed optimism. “There’s so much gravity pulling us down right now,” says the artist. “I try to focus on the positive, to paint things that are elevating.”

When Chris Mummert was just 3 years old—back in the late-1950s era from which his images often appear to spring—his family traveled from their home in the El Monte Valley, about half an hour east of San Diego, to visit his grandparents in the small town of Cherokee, IA. One day, while the grownups were otherwise occupied, little Chris got ahold of a crayon and “drew a stick figure on my grandparents’ brand-new wallpaper,” he remembers with a chuckle at what became a regularly retold family anecdote.

His mother managed to wash the drawing away, and no punishment ensued. After all, the boy was already beginning to evidence a talent that continued to develop as the years went on. “By the second grade,” Mummert says, “I was doing all kinds of art projects, and always helping the other kids.” All the nuns at the Catholic school he attended through eighth grade encouraged him, and that support continued through his years at Grossmont High. “By default, I became the school artist,” he says modestly. He painted in his spare time, too, taking on portrait commissions starting at the age of 14.

During one high-school art class, he first heard a name that would come to mean a great deal to him. “I was doing a drawing, and a girl turned around, saw it, and said, ‘That looks like a Norman Rockwell.’ I said to her, ‘Who’s he?’” Mummert soon found out the answer. “That guy changed my life. He became a new hero to me. To this day, every time I get cocky, all I have to do is open a book and look at his work, and it humbles me.”

He received enthusiastic support from his parents, too. Every Saturday, his mother drove him to the complex of beautiful old buildings in San Diego’s Balboa Park. There he took private drawing and painting lessons from noted local painter Loretta Metzger McLeod, a graduate of the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts. By the time of his high-school graduation in 1973, he had long since made up his mind: “I was going to be a full-time fine artist.”

Other life responsibilities, however, sent Mummert’s energies in another direction. At the age of 19, he began instead to help his family in its nascent auto-repair business, eventually becoming its manager as it grew to become one of the best-rated and most successful operations of its kind in the western United States. Along the way he also met his wife Deanna, marrying her 37 years ago, having a son and a daughter, and settling down on just over 2 hillside acres of horse country in the same idyllic valley where he grew up.

But Mummert never forsook painting. In 1976, his mother showed him an article in The San Diego Union newspaper about an art school that had been opened in town by Alexander Chidichimo, a successful advertising artist from Chicago who had trained under Sunny Sundblom. “He took me under his wing,” says Mummert of the man who became his mentor. In 1989, Chris and Deanna met Chidichimo in Madrid, where he introduced them to the wonders of the Prado and the historic home and museum of Joaquín Sorolla. The highly regarded Spanish artist portrayed sunlit Iberian scenes with a radiance and immediacy that resonated strongly with Mummert, who found himself inspired by the “sun-infused, beautiful Southern California light.”

Around that time, Mummert began working in the open air. “Between 1990 and 1995 I put 185,000 miles on my old Ford Ranger pickup,” he says, driving around San Diego and its environs to paint the scenes that had been celebrated by the region’s first plein-air painters almost a century before, including the beaches he’d frequently visited with his family and the mountains where they’d go horse camping for two weeks every year. In 1991, a gallery in the city’s historic Gaslamp Quarter gave him his first professional one-man show, featuring 36 of his landscapes.

His life continued with that work-and-art juggling act for another 21 years, as Mummert spent every moment he could spare at his easel during evenings and weekends. More and more, however, the urge grew to follow his original passion. “I’m getting too old to never live my dream,” he remembers thinking. So, on the morning of September 23, 2012, he recalls, he “made the choice,” handed in his keys to the company car, and became a full-time fine artist.

He continued to paint plein-air scenes as well as other subjects he loved, including western scenes and the classic airplanes that have fascinated him since childhood visits to Lindbergh Field, the original name for what is now San Diego International Airport. But increasingly, Mummert began focusing on figurative work, heeding the advice of a gallery owner who told him, “If you go to world-famous museums, they usually showcase their paintings of the human figure. It’s such a strength you have that you should really push more and more in that direction.”

And so he has, with admirable dedication. “I’m on this constant improvement treadmill,” says Mummert, with a note of happy astonishment at his own single-mindedness. “I always want to be better today than I was yesterday.”

His efforts show in a succession of paintings shining with sun-kissed life and abounding in impressively rendered detail. Take, for example, COWGIRLS HAVE ALL THE FUN!, a work that was inspired by a photo of a young Dale Evans, the cowgirl singer, songwriter, and actress who partnered so memorably with her husband Roy Rogers in film and on television in the late 1940s and ’50s. Mummert posed his model—a local triathlete with all-American good looks—reclining against a bale of hay in authentic western clothes from his collection of costumes. Then he photographed her and transferred the images to his computer.

Using raw umber oil paint, Mummert sketched out the cowgirl on a double-primed linen surface to which he’d already applied a thin wash of the same color. On the wall to her right, he painted an assortment of old posters from western movies of the era that he’d carefully researched, balancing out the composition and adding intrigue. Then, over the course of many layers, and working from dark to light and background to foreground, he built up a sense of depth and detail. His painstaking work on the lettering of the posters necessitated frequent breaks. “I had to go out and take walks,” he laughs. On the other hand, the “wild brushwork” of the hay bale drew on his wealth of impressionistic plein-air experience.

Like all of Mummert’s paintings, the results are enthralling for the viewer. And in fact, it’s exactly that strong connection he’s seeking. “I want to reach people emotionally, for them to identify with my paintings and maybe project themselves into those scenes,” he says. “In the end, what I do is not about me, it’s about the audience. I’m painting for both of us.”

representation
Sorrel Sky Gallery, Santa Fe, NM, and Durango, CO; Sanders Galleries, Tucson, AZ.

This story appeared in the March/April 2021 issue of Southwest Art magazine.