Gentry Mullen has wanted to paint since he was 14 years old. Now, after 35 years in graphic design, he’s launching that career. “The last arc of my professional life,” he calls it.
Mullen says the point of his work, thus far, has not been to satisfy his own creativity, but to communicate messages to his company’s customers effectively.
But, he says, “My creative self, that is what you’re seeing in this room. These are the images I want to see.”
Mullen stares around the immaculate, white workshop in the basement of his home where, mounted on the walls and illuminated by bright track lighting, are wood panel cutouts of rabbits, foxes, crows, and a pointy-nosed figure in a dunce’s cap. The shape might be taken for Pinocchio, but the painter didn’t have the Disney cartoon in mind; it was the original Carlo Collodi version that really got him thinking.
He read, and has now reimagined, the character as a “symbol for the difficulty of being human.”
Pinocchio tries to do the right thing, Mullen says, but he just can’t resist doing the exact opposite, even going so far as to consort with ne’er-do-wells.
His former teacher, mentor and now friend, Jason Pollen, is an emeritus professor at the Kansas City Art Institute. Pollen thinks the use of the figure was political in origin.
He noticed Mullen begin conjuring the image “when,” he says, “lies were, and are, rampant. And I think that’s what that figure represents. His nose, Pinocchio’s nose, grew when he lied.”
Like many artists’ paths – and maybe like Pinocchio’s, though not as nefarious – Mullen’s path was neither straight nor narrow. He graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute with an emphasis in fiber art, thinking that might lead him into “some sort of industry,” he recalls thinking.
That industry was graphic design, where he eventually taught himself how to use computer design tools. He worked for Cerner, “The Kansas City Star,” the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and will retire from Burns & McDonnell.
During the pandemic as Mullen dove into painting, he knew he did not want to paint in a rectangle. So, he asked himself questions like: What is a painting? What does a painting look like?
“And I realized that I had a whole set of tools; it was an epiphany to realize that I could use the tools that I use in my day-to-day job as a designer, that I could bring them all to painting,” he explains.
“Once I gave myself permission to do that, the floodgates opened. It all became, not easy, but not intimidating to me.”
Mullen designs the shapes and sends the images to Hammerspace Workshop, where a technician turns them into wood cutouts; then he textures on the paint by combing or scratching, and using friskets, stencils and masks.
Most of the cutouts are a few feet wide or high, and Mullen hangs them two to three inches from the wall to capitalize on the play of shadows and emphasize their sculptural presence.
“I want them to float a little bit. The shadows are, for me, a component of the piece that’s just as valid or important as the painted panel,” he says.
They all float, the human and the animals, and sometimes they interact with each other.
In a triptych he calls “Secret Garden,” a crow and a fox watch a running rabbit that’s looking over its shoulder. Each is atop a stylized flower bed.
“Rabbits represent something very vulnerable, whereas crows represent something very aggressive, smart, possibly evil or ill-intended,” Mullens says. “It takes my imagination to lots of different places, and hopefully the viewership’s as well.”
Pollen remembers that Mullen had a playful way of using imagery while he was a student.
“Gentry has a lot of different skills, and when he masters them, he’s the best at them,” Pollen says. “As a graphic designer, having to master those processes, he had to rely on text and the computer. At school, there were no computers at that time, so it changed dramatically once he used the computer, which he’s now using also to create the objects that you’ve seen.”
As Mullen continues to work toward using the tools of his trade in the work that satisfies his soul, he thinks about others’ art that speaks to him so deeply he wishes he had created it – that’s what he’s aiming for.
“Maybe someone will look at my work someday and say, ‘Boy, I wish I would have created that,’” Mullens says. “I don’t know if that’ll happen or not. I hope it does. But I do want to create images that I want to look at.”
Mullen’s first solo show runs from Jan. 11 to March 22 at the Kansas City Public Library’s Central location (14 W. 10th St.). “Fact & Fiction” includes about a dozen paintings that are sculptural in nature.
photos by Anne Kniggendorf
