2005 Honored Artist

Mel Fillerup

Fillerup has created more than three thousand paintings and countless sketches ranging from landscapes to animals, portraits, scenes of ranch life, and sailboats on the sea. Working in oil, watercolor, and drawings, he has canvassed the American West and traced his worldwide travels from Mexico to Australia to Portugal.

Fillerup’s selection as our third annual Honored Artist and his recent completion of two murals for the Wasatch Campus of Utah Valley State College are personal highlights in the artistic life of this eighty-one-year-old Wyoming native.

“Completing those murals and receiving this honor in my hometown stand out at the height of my painting career,” Fillerup says. “It really humbles me to be considered alongside the previous honored artists James Bama and Wilson Hurley.”

Born in 1924 in Lovell, Wyoming, Fillerup’s interest in art dates to his childhood on the family farm. When he was six years old, his parents gave him a set of illustrated nursery stories called “My Book House.” He took great delight in copying the illustrations he saw in these and other books people gave him.

During his military service and on missions for the Mormon Church, Fillerup decorated postcards and envelopes with small watercolors and drawings and mailed them home to wife Ruth, his children, and other relatives and friends who treasure them to this day.

Fillerup’s talent blossomed during his thirties and forties, but art remained a leisure pursuit as he earned a law degree and established a practice in Cody that lasted twenty-five years. He embraced art as a full-time profession around age fifty.

Throughout his life, Fillerup has felt driven to head for the countryside to make field studies with pen and ink or oil. His family would often join him, painting landscapes of their own. Sons Mel and Selvoy are still painting today, and Peter has acquired national acclaim as a sculptor.

Fillerup feels hard-pressed to define the source of his inspiration, except that he knows when it strikes him as an element of design shining through the colors and light he observes in the field. He says 75-80 percent of his work is based on those studies.

“When you’re in the field, you hear the birds singing, you smell the wildflowers, and you can get the colors,” he said. “When you paint from a photo, you can lose the fidelity and feel of the colors. It’s like painting with one eye. When you’re out on the land, you’re painting with both eyes.”

Fillerup is especially fond of Yellowstone National Park and the surrounding region. This region “has it all,” he says, from cowboy life to wildlife and landscapes. His recent Yellowstone Lilies features one of his favorite places, alongside De Lacy Creek on the approach to Shoshone Lake. The painting is his consigned intent-to-purchase piece in the Buffalo Bill Art Show & Sale and is also featured on the 2005 commemorative Rendezvous Royale poster.

Fillerup will give a public lecture at 2 p.m. Friday, September 23, at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center. From 3-4 p.m., he’ll sign copies of the Rendezvous Royale poster and The Artistry of Melvin M. Fillerup, a book about his life and works by Carl Bechtold.