ROOTED IN ART

More than a half-century after getting his break covering a Lake Forest tennis match, Mark McMahon is still capturing history with his sketchpad and insatiable curiosity.

THERE’S SO MUCH ARTISTIC TALENT in Mark McMahon’s family, it’s nearly impossible to avoid pondering the age-old nature versus nurture argument. Are they all carriers of some “art gene,” or were the conditions of their upbringing in Chicago and the North Shore an ideal incubator for ceaseless creativity?

To hear McMahon tell the story, it was undoubtedly the environment. From his studio in his gorgeous Edward Humrick midcentury home in Lake Forest, he recently expounded on his early exposure to beautiful things and unconventional places—the family trips in a VW bus every summer and his teachers at various Lake Forest schools who understood that McMahon and his artist siblings were cut from a different cloth and didn’t try to force him into conformity.

“The teachers were nice to just put up with us,” McMahon says with a laugh. “We always were sort of pushing on the edge all the time. Patience was one of their main virtues. That got us through. And we were taught from early on to look outside ourselves.”

It’s a thought that brings McMahon full circle to his project of the moment: fundraising for the Lake Forest High School (LFHS) theater department. A LFHS graduate himself, McMahon recently sketched the school’s performance of the Tony-winning play The Drowsy Chaperone (his grandson, Rylan, was part of the stage crew) in support of the capital campaign. His original artwork will be donated to the school and placed in the theater’s renovated lobby, and limited-edition prints will be sold to raise money for needed improvements. (He also worked with LFHS students on a 100-foot school mural in the mid-‘90s and another for Everett Elementary in 2014.)

“This theater department has a lot of dreamers wandering around,” he says. “They’re heading for something, you know? You see it in their eyes. They’re trying to figure out where they’re going to fit in this whole scene.”

It’s something McMahon knows a bit about—being the high school kid sitting in class looking out the school window and contemplating greener pastures.

His father was groundbreaking American illustrator Franklin McMahon, and he made it a practice to take his young son out with him on his “on location” art-making excursions.

Franklin was known for combining his art with reporting, covering history-defining events like the Emmett Till trial, the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, civil rights marches, or NASA launches, taking out his sketch pad and capturing the moment in his trademark style. His career landed him among the greats of American illustration, featured in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and Smithsonian Institution, among many more—and this summer, his work is being celebrated in The Norman Rockwell Museum’s 250-year celebration exhibition, titled Visions of a Nation: 250 Years from Revolution to Rockwell. Mark’s mom, Irene Leahy McMahon, won the Mark Twain Writing Award for travel writing multiple times.

Like his parents, McMahon had a deep well of curiosity, and he poured it into various creative projects, eventually landing on the same reportorial style practiced by his father. The illustrations that adorn the walls of his home and studio echo Franklin’s confident, elegantly imperfect lines accentuated by bursts of vibrant color. McMahon’s first break came when he talked his way into covering the Virginia Slims tennis tournament in Lake Forest in the early ‘70s for a local newspaper.

“I would sit in the press room and work on my drawings. You would see Billie Jean King and Françoise Dürr—just one of many fortuitous events for the young McMahon, who seemed to be getting good at making his own luck.

“CBS was there, and they noticed I was doing these drawings,” he says. “They were looking for a LeRoy Neiman type, and I was sitting there. And by the end of the competition, I was doing the starter images for the Virginia Slims program on CBS.”

It was the beginning of a career spanning six decades and a list of marquee clients that includes Sports Illustrated, NASA, Apple Computer, Carson Pirie Scott, O’Hare Airport, and the U.S. Air Force, to name only a few.

“I’ve been very lucky for 50 or 60 years, doing what I want to do,” McMahon reflects. “When I got married, I walked into my art studio job in Chicago and I said, ‘I’m getting married, I quit.’ Well, most guys don’t do that.”

He attributes his artistic longevity to several factors—his family and teachers, and his ability to “bob and weave” and “say yes” to opportunities when they arise. McMahon also notes that a business sense is a good thing to have when you want to carve out a life for yourself as an artist.

“I am not only an artist. I am a marketing guy and a businessman,” he says. “I was the least expected out of my class to have survived more than an hour and a half out of school.”

Not only has Mark McMahon survived, he’s been a sought-after artist from the moment he headed out on his own, continuing the legacy of his family and inspiring the next generation to follow their passion and shape their own vision of the world—whether on a dog-eared drawing pad or a high-school stage.