Call Him an Artist Who Happens to Act : In his talk at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, TV veteran Martin Mull says painting, his first love, remains his true vocation.

By RICK VANDERKNYFF

Dec. 2, 1993 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

NEWPORT BEACH — Martin Mull, best known as an actor and comedian, admits he’s not always taken as seriously as he’d like when he tells people he is also a painter.

“Really?” he’s often asked. “Did you know Tony Curtis paints?”

From that typical response, Mull told an audience Tuesday at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, the conversation usually turns to other celebrity dabblers in the arts, from Elke Sommer and Red Skelton to Anthony Quinn and, “God forbid, Sly Stallone, and those large monstrosities he paints.”

Taking pains to distinguish himself from dilettantes who take up the brush as a way to unwind after a long day on the sound stage, Mull emphasized that his TV and movie work (even his regular role on the hit series “Roseanne”) is his “day job”; painting, his first love, remains his true vocation.

Mull received some validation of his artistic endeavors recently from Newport Harbor when the museum chose two of his paintings for its current Newport Biennial group show.

The exhibit’s curator, Bruce Guenther, said he was not aware of Mull’s life as an actor and comedian when he chose two of the artist’s works for the show. Guenther has said he chose the paintings, “Untitled (White Dog)” and “Dejeuner sur Patio,” because he liked “their sense of social satire, of scenes that evolve and you’re not quite sure where they’re going. . . . They have a nice edge, a twist.”

Although Mull’s talk was peppered with the dry wit that is his trademark, he also made it clear that painting is a serious pursuit in which he works to “tame the demons, bring them out into the sunlight and befriend them.”

Mull, 50, got his master’s degree in painting in the 1960s from the Rhode Island School of Design. He fell into performing as a way to make “cigarette and beer money” during what he called the “folk-music scare of the ‘60s.”

One of the “world’s worst singers,” by his own appraisal, Mull devised long, humorous introductions to his songs and gradually became better known as a comic than as a musician. He later picked up television work, most notably as host of the “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” talk-show-spoof spinoff “Fernwood 2-Night” in the ‘70s, and occasional film work (he is in the hit “Mrs. Doubtfire”).

But for all his success as an entertainer, Mull said, “during all that time, if asked, I would have said, ‘I’m a painter.’ ”

He said he has gone through several stylistic phases. His current mode started about a decade ago, when he put down his airbrush after about eight years as a photo-realist.

“I (suddenly) felt like a freaking dentist,” he explained. “I wasn’t even touching the canvas.”

His current paintings feature partially realized figures and objects that emerge, dreamlike, from a murky white background. Close inspection reveals remnants of painted images removed chemically from the canvas, the physical reminders of a painstaking process in which Mull might paint and erase dozens, even hundreds, of images.

“All that appears to be blank canvas is anything but,” Mull said. “There are countless images and ghosts in there.”

Mull illustrated his talk Tuesday with slides of his recent work, ranging from simple drawings to some completed paintings. The drawings, some as small as 2 by 3 inches, form a “glossary” of images for his paintings, Mull said.

He spends at least two hours every day drawing, in a process he likens to automatic writing. “I don’t sit down to draw these (particular) images,” Mull said. “Without sounding too odd about it, they just come through me.”

Often, what emerges are snatches of childhood memories and echoes of illustrations from books he read as a boy. Book illustrations, Mull said, were his only exposure to art during an Ohio childhood he described as “agrarian reform.”

The art he saw as a child “was, at best, Norman Rockwell, and probably less than that,” Mull said. Still, he added, “these kinds of (book illustration) images have struck very deep chords with me.”

When he works on a painting, Mull arranges--and rearranges--these images constantly and trying to view the work as a detached “audience” until the work feels complete.

“The painting itself has a will, and tells you what it wants to be,” Mull said. Early in his marriage, he said, his wife “had trouble understanding that sitting on the couch and staring at a painting for 4 1/2 hours was work.”

Although he is a regular on “Roseanne” (where he plays a partner in Roseanne’s restaurant and one of the few gay characters in television) his schedule allows plenty of time for his art.

He works only about two weeks out of the month. During those weeks, he works only a couple of hours a day until the show is taped on Thursday. While some sitcoms will labor for hours on a taping, “Roseanne” will sometimes wrap in less than an hour. “Rosie (series star Roseanne Arnold) doesn’t like to work,” Mull said. “Who does?”

Mull acknowledged that his success in entertainment has given him freedom as an artist, and he can even choose to be picky about to whom he sells his works.

“When I do sell a painting, I feel like I’m sending a kid off to college,” Mull said. “I want to make sure it’s a good school.”

During a question-and-answer session, the audience of about 120 (larger than usual for the museum’s Tuesday art talks) respectfully kept most of its queries to art rather than to show business.

When asked about the use of art as a political vehicle, Mull made no apologies for the intensely personal nature of his works, citing the quote frequently attributed to movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn: “If I want to send a message, I’ll call Western Union.”

“Art is not the reporting arm of the world’s discontent,” Mull said. “It is the alternative to the world’s discontent, and I don’t want to gunk it up.”