Clúdach: Cover

Our cover image, Karl Mullen’s The Táin, is a classic upon, or within, a classic. By choosing vintage pages from The Iliad unto which to paint his images of the Irish epic, Mullen creates a world within a world—one mythic vision within the next. Just as Joseph Campbell talked of the “hero with a thousand faces” that resounds throughout world culture, Mullen taps into something both primitive and profound in his work. As Mullen has written to the editor, “So [it’s] a story on a story and my story as an artist on top.”

Mullen has been characterized as both an art brut and folk painter. He emigrated to the States from Dublin at twenty-one and is currently working in his studio in Massachusetts. Mullen’s materials consist of everything from Barry’s Tea to red wine to walnut oil and ink. Ultimately, his work captures what it is to be Irish, American, American Irish, Irish American (or just human). We are all a story within a story with our own story to add.

The Táin by Karl Mullen. 12 × 17, mixed media on vintage paper. Mullen’s paintings reside in many private collections in the United States and Europe and in the permanent holdings of the Polk Museum of Art (Lakeland, Florida), the Hurn Museum of Contemporary Folk Art (Savannah, Georgia), and Robert Morris University (Chicago, Illinois). For more information: http://www.amerifolk.com/artists/karl-mullen/ and https://www.jtfolkart.com/karlmullen.