Martin Mull poses at the Las Vegas Art Museum prior to the opening of a retrospective of his work, "Adventures in a Temperate Climate." Photo by Ronda Churchill Mull's "Apocrypha" (2000) uses seemingly unrelated imagery, such as that found in a children's book, to create a unified painting.

There have been many actors turned artists in Hollywood, from Red Skelton to Tony Curtis and Anthony Quinn.

But Martin Mull shouldn't be included in that list. That's because Mull, who's perhaps best known for his work in television shows such as "Fernwood 2Nite" and "Roseanne," started out as an artist and turned to performing as a way to help pay his way through college, first with a few gigs as a musician, then several music and comedy albums. With absolutely no experience as an actor, he began making his living in show business.

But with a master's degree in fine art from the Rhode Island School of Design, Mull is a serious painter, not a dabbler.

A retrospective of his work, "Adventures in a Temperate Climate," is on display at the Las Vegas Art Museum through Aug. 25. Some of the paintings in the show are borrowed from the collections of Steve Martin as well as local collectors.

"My mother said I started drawing when I was 3," Mull said while in the city last week to hang his exhibit.

While growing up in Ohio in a family that was far short of being rich, Mull only saw art in magazines like the Saturday Evening Post and on cereal boxes.

His childhood was "very nondescript. Very hand to mouth. It seemed to kind of go by. Only in retrospect do I get to look back and see what it was all about. When you're 62 you get some perspective."

When the family moved to Connecticut when he was 16, Mull said it had a shattering effect. His WASP world was turned upside down.

"If you believed that was America, you were in for some awakenings," he said. "And the commercial art of the time reinforced that mythology, that promise that came after World War II that we'll all have cars and college educations. I discovered how misinformed that all was."

Moving to the East Coast opened his eyes.

"In high school I learned there really was a world of art out there," Mull said.

He used to watch a television show about art and was hooked by those paint-by-numbers kits that were big in the 1950s.

With acting paying the bills, Mull could pursue his first love. In the beginning, he used an airbrush to create photorealist canvases. "Then I abandoned it. It seemed more of a craft than an art. There weren't enough accidents, in a way."

The exhibit begins with an airbrush work from 1984 with "Dog in Tub," a work that used a tiny bathtub from a children's play set and a small ceramic dog. Also from 1984 is the humorous "Italian Landscape," featuring a group of ceramic dogs around an abandoned pizza box. That period of his work pretty much ended with the 1985 work "Lucky," a photorealist painting with a dog lying on a wood deck next to a chaise longue.

The exhibit jumps to 1992, when Mull had basically started over as an artist "to see what painting was all about," he said. The works of that time period, oil on linen, are minimalist paintings with objects and heads floating on the surface.

But by the late 1990s, Mull had changed styles again, incorporating a number of images on linen, some upside down, in a collage effect.

"I started delving more into my childhood," Mull said. "The last six to eight years I've been dealing with my childhood recollections, the world I grew up in. It's imagery that almost looks like a 'Dick and Jane' reader."

In works from 2000 to 2002, Mull used images from various sources and "slammed them together to see if I can make sense of them. I'm looking for it to become evocative, a whole that's greater than the sum of its parts and creates an emotional impact. It's very much like improvising."

Many of his paintings are multipaneled. The trick is "getting them to stand alone and together at the same time. It's the cross-talk between them that becomes a whole other image."

In 2004, Mull began incorporating wallpaper images for the paintings' borders as a way of putting an American twist on the ornate frames that once were prevalent.

"It's important that these be American," he said. "It's important that you paint what you know and be unmistakably American."

But while there are a few touches of humor in his work, there's also a darker mood. "There's a certain melancholy and a certain sadness, a sense of loss. But with that you also have a sense of something gained."

While being an actor made it possible over the years for Mull to spend up to 12 hours a day, seven days a week in his studio, he also seems a bit frustrated that his celebrity as a performer often overshadows his art.

"The reaction I get is you can be a painter, but you can't be a serious one," Mull said. "For some reason there's this bullshit cachet to being on television. It has been an uphill battle. I get compared to people who are admittedly dabblers (in art).

"... But ultimately art is something that's very satisfying. I'm extraordinarily grateful that things turned out the way they did. The last few years I've been able to support myself as a painter, which is nothing short of a miracle."