Art & Creativity Quote by Martin Mull

There’s a delicious double-take baked into Martin Mull’s “with a vengeance”: the phrase belongs to revenge thrillers and tabloid comebacks, not to the quiet, solvent-scented patience of painting. Mull, an actor whose career often traded on deadpan intelligence, uses that overpowered language to hint at something more urgent than a hobby revived. The joke is that art-making is being framed like payback. The subtext is that it sort of is.

Around 1980 sits at an inflection point for a performer like Mull. Television and comedy can make you famous fast, then flatten you into a type. When he says he went back to painting, he’s signaling a move from being interpreted by casting directors to doing the interpreting himself. “Went back” implies a first identity, maybe even a truer one, that got deferred by the practical velocity of show business. “Vengeance” implies resentment at that detour: time lost, seriousness questioned, work dismissed as dabbling because the public already “knows” you as something else.

It’s also a neat act of self-defense. Celebrities who paint are often treated as vanity tourists; Mull preempts that condescension by insisting on intensity, on appetite, on output. The line works because it collapses two cultural scripts - the actor’s comeback and the artist’s return to the studio - and makes them collide. You can hear the grit under the punchline: not reinvention for branding, but reclamation for sanity.