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Sept. 28 – Mel McCuddin is a prolific and beloved Spokane artist whose work is a blend of bright colors, plenty of whimsy, and sometimes just a hint of darkness , died Monday at the age of 89.
McCartine, a truck driver, painted at night until retirement, which allowed him to work full-time, painting large and small canvases, often creating multiple paintings at the same time in the Millwood home’s backyard studio, where he and his 69-year-old His wife, Gloria, works there, raising their family.
The Spokane Veterans Memorial houses six large paintings of McCartine, whose work has been collected worldwide.
Artist Mel McCuddin takes a break from work at his Spokane Valley studio on October 22, 2018. (DAN PELLE)
His creative process always begins with a painting on canvas, without preconceived notions of what the subject is. As he told former Spokesman Review columnist Doug Clark in 2016, “I start a painting with no idea in mind, and at some point in the process of applying paint to the canvas. At times, an idea will suggest itself.
“Many of these ideas were changed, and many ideas were rejected until one seemed strong enough to accept. So my painting is essentially a record of the evolution of ideas.”
Born in 1933 and raised on a dairy farm in Spokane’s North Side, McCuddin has a passion for art since childhood and continued to make art after high school in North Central. But, as he told Clark, he kept it a secret because he was “fearful of what people would think.”
It was Gloria who encouraged him to pursue his passion, and he told Clark that he did. During his day job as a dairy truck driver — first with Early Dawn, then with Darigold — he took art classes whenever possible. His early works in the 1950s were outdoor scenes. He told Clark that by the 1960s he was creating abstract works, and by the 1970s the figurative expressionist style for which he was known began to emerge.
“For a long time, I felt more than what I saw,” he said, “a painting with a strong presence.”
Clark and his wife Shirley co-authored a compendium of McCartine’s work, “The McCartine: The Inside Eye,” in 2019. In it, McCuddin describes his painting technique: “The paint is poured, dripped, rubbed and rubbed, and I use a rag and fingertip at least as often as I use a brush. Decisions about color, light, space, etc., are very It’s largely intuitive. Colors are often handled by overlaying a cool primer with a warm color. This technique gives the paint an inherent sheen.
His son Mason grew up watching his father paint.
“When I was a kid, his studio was in our basement for a long time, and I would visit him,” Mason McCartine said. “He put down a bunch of colors and looked at it and turned it over and looked at it. I remember asking him when I was about 6, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘Sit down, this is me work. “And he kept doing the same thing until the end.”
Mason McCuddin describes it as similar to finding animals in a cloud. “He said, ‘Keep looking, and eventually you might see a certain shape. It might look like a person, it might look like an animal, it might look like a coffee pot,” he said. “That was the one thing that really bothered me in my life. He taught me how to see.”
Karen Mobley, an artist and arts administrator who ran the city’s arts department for 15 years, said she suspects many in Spokane will be saddened to learn of McCartine’s death.
“He was such a lovely person. He was always, always, so loving and generous to everyone,” Mobley said. “He’s been very successful professionally, but throughout his life he’s been a gentle, shy guy.”
One thing she fondly remembers was that McCartine was “sly and cunning”.
“He’s funny. You can tell by his work that he has such an amazing sense of humor,” Mobley said. “He was always drawing these people doing these stupid things with their weird and awkward anatomy – too big hands, too small hands, all the creepy eyes.”
The kind of creepy, dark or mischievous that shines beneath the surface of some of McCartine’s most memorable works. As he told Clark in 2016, while some thought his work was a little dark, “I’m not that at all. It all comes from paint.”
Mason McCuddin said he suspects that many of the subtexts or layers of his father’s work were the result of the process he used and not intentional. “He kind of leaves it to the audience to find those things in the background,” he said. “It’s somewhat dependent on the audience’s background, because everyone brings something to their viewing experience.”
For 25 years, McCartine has represented Art Spirit Gallery in Coeur d’Alene. For several years, he also exhibited at the Mango Tango Gallery in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. This Saturday, Spirit of the Arts opens its annual October McCuddin exhibition.
The gallery owner, Blair Williams, said she and the gallery staff were hanging paintings on the walls, “watching us walking around, holding them up and saying, ‘Ah, look at this,’ and ‘Ah, this One brings me joy.”
“We’re going to do everything we can to be proud of (Mel). That’s our job.”
McCuddin’s appeal stems from a variety of sources, Williams said – the palette and warm colors he uses draw viewers in, while the image always “results in pauses,” meaning it makes the viewer pause, examine and think piece. “What is that? Why is that? Why is he looking at that? Why is he holding that? Why is it disproportionate?” she said. “Whenever you ‘pause’ and you have a palette that appeals to you, you can’t help but start bringing your own story into the work, and I think that’s why they’re always so popular.”
Although, she adds, the number one reason people become fans of McCartine’s paintings is because of McCartine himself.
“Once people get a chance to meet and get to know Mel McCartine, you can’t help but fall in love with them,” she said. “You get to know his nature, his kindness, his gentle soul, which makes you re-examine these works in a different light.”
Mason McCartine said his family — their mother Gloria; brother, Neil; and sister Colleen — had no plans to hold a memorial service. In this month’s Spirit of Art exhibition, Williams said the gallery will be launching a book where McCartin’s friends and fans can share stories. Williams said the gallery will pass the book on to McCartine’s family.
(c) 2022 Speaker Commentary (Spokane, WA)
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