Chase Mullen: Absence, Presence, and the Spaces in Between

Perspectives: Chase Mullen

Absence, Presence, and the Space in Between

By James Fox-Smith

It doesn’t matter where you live in Louisiana, nature always crowds in. Whether in a city apartment, suburban ranch house, or bayouside shack, we live amid riotous abundance— the region’s perfect storm of warm air, fertile soil, and water, water, everywhere creating conditions for growth that guarantee the boundary separating human and natural realms to forever be contested territory. Alligators amble along highway shoulders, deer devour our gardens, kudzu’s emerald tendrils creep over neglected structures. To try and impose order upon the Louisiana landscape is to live with the impression that Mother Nature is ever on the verge of gaining the upper hand. If we were to turn our backs, we might be swallowed whole.

This liminal space is where painter Chase Mullen plies his craft. In acrylic paint on birch panels, Mullen draws on a lifelong fascination with the work of early naturalists and scientific illustrators like John James Audubon, creating precise, photo-realistic work that juxtaposes the secret life of Louisiana’s flora and fauna against the man-made in exquisite, startling ways. A marsh wren’s nest overtakes a gas lantern’s glass chamber; a buck clears the hood of a police cruiser at a leap; a single strand of web stretched between a watering can’s body and spout, quivers beneath the banana spider’s delicate advance. Wild hog piglets trot jauntily beneath mailboxes all askew as accumulated mail spills from an open flap. Road signs, street lamps, a rusting paint can: totems of human endeavor without a human to be seen. But everything so beautiful, so alive, making the viewer ponder: if we all were to vanish tomorrow, how long before no trace of us remains?

It is said that nature abhors a vacuum. In Mullen’s work life creeps, crawls, and flutters in, filling any void that we humans leave vacant. “That’s the juxtaposition; I’m always coming back to that,” observed Mullen, explaining that when he first started carving out a narrative path for himself as a painter, he went looking for a way to marry the exquisite attention to detail and anatomic accuracy of early scientific illustration, with a contemporary aesthetic. “I looked at those early naturalists and scientific illustrators then asked, ‘What would that look like in 2021?’ It would look like what the world looks like. It’s not the untouched natural landscape that Audubon saw. It’s changing. My task is recording the creature how it lives today.” The result: photographic realism set against an incongruous backdrop that renders Mullen’s work ever so slightly surreal, and integrates an element of humor, too.

‘Anytime you incorporate things from the civilized world with ‘varmints’ there’s something inherently funny there,’ Mullen noted, thinking about a piece with a raccoon sporting about in a blue wheelbarrow while a red fox dashes by. It’s a humor that demystifies, creates affection. By setting his plant and animal lives amid the mundane stuff of human existence, Mullen’s work elicits not only a smile, but also empathy for the creatures striving to retain a foothold in our increasingly crowded world.

But if there’s a deeper note of environmental activism here, Mullen says it’s not by any grand design. Where death features prominently in his work—and it does—it’s presented more in the spirit of scientific observation, than as the sounding of an environmental alarm. In a piece named “Fructify,” a young lotus flower springs forth from a vacated turtle shell. “I wanted to do something with a turtle shell for aesthetic reasons,” Mullen explained, “and out of fascination with the way evolution pushed this thing to grow its own shell. But it’s hard to think about a turtle shell without thinking about the dead turtle, so I made one with a lotus flower growing out of it. When I finished, it didn’t remind me of death. Yes, it’s a rotting shell, but it reminded me of new life.”

Looking at this work, it’s easy to go looking for hidden meaning—messages about life, death, renewal and decay. But Mullen said that building allegory into his paintings isn’t a driving factor. “I’m not hiding messages here,” he explained. “Sometimes I consider certain narratives that I could build or layer in. But this is more about using the South’s flora, fauna, and landscape to make something that fits into new contemporary, and also pays homage to the South. If I can also work in a subtext about the modernization of this landscape, great. But mostly this is about really finding my culture, and then adding something to it.”

Speaking of adding, Mullen and his wife welcome their first child—a little girl—this spring. Does he think that might change his work? Might little people find their way in at last? “I can feel already that I’m going to be taking myself significantly less seriously,” Mullen said. “I’m excited to have a young mind around, to remind me what creativity looks like. And if for some reason she really likes butterflies … then there will be more butterflies.”

chasemullenstudios.com instagram.com/chasemullenstudios

Chase Mullen