Born in Phoenix, Arizona, before the great postwar boom, Mell’s evolution as an artist would prove as dramatic and dynamic as the city of his birth. An avid drawer as a child—influenced by his brother’s drawings of the instruments of war as well as the automobiles and futuristic design of the era—Mell later matriculated at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, where he studied illustration and design. Despite his considerable success in the world of New York advertising, life as a commercial artist proved unfulfilling for Mell, and he eventually returned to his native Arizona in the 1970s to teach art on the Hopi reservation. The resultant juxtaposition of big-city life with the quiet beauty of the rural Southwest deeply impressed itself upon Mell’s mind, and he took to sketching landscapes with colored pencils before transitioning to paints. By 1978, fine-art painting had become Mell’s full-fledged vocation, and his bold representations of the Southwest quickly earned him a wide following. Vacillating between abstraction and realism, Mell has showed himself a prolific and most versatile artist—exchanging Southwestern landscapes for portraits of cowboys, cattle, and cacti and oil on canvas, his primary medium, for bronze sculpture. His work has been exhibited in nine museum shows and is represented in dozens of corporate and private collections.