Merrill Mahaffey taught design and art history at the Phoenix College from 1967 until 1983. His reputation as a landscape painter in Arizona began developing in the early 1970s. Merrill Mahaffey's work has evolved from an earlier abstract style to his present realism, reflecting the best traditions of American landscape painting. With lithography and serigraphy, Merrill Mahaffey maintains the same expansive, panoramic quality found in his paintings, rendering certain basic yet complex abstract relationships in nature with the visionary technique that is uniquely his own.