Native African American, artist Richard Mayhew was a landscape painter, illustrator, Jazz singer, and arts educator. He worked and resided in Santa Cruz and Soquel, California. He has also been the subject of a documentary, ‘Richard Mayhew: Spiritual Landscapes’ (2000). He has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions.
Early Life and Career
Artist Richard Mayhew was born on April 3, 1924, in Amityville, New York. His mother would take him to New York City to view paintings, where he developed an admiration for landscape painter George Inness. Richard Mayhew studied at the Art Students League of New York and Brooklyn Museum Art School. He played Jazz at a few local clubs. After his first solo exhibition in Brooklyn in 1955, he concluded his singing career.
Artist Richard Mayhew was a founding member of Spiral, a group of black painters in the 1960s in New York. The group was established in 1963 for artists to talk about their Civil Rights movement experiences.
Richard Mayhew Artist Style
A quintessential Richard Mayhew art piece is characterised by his Native African American experiences as well as his passion for jazz and the performing arts. He mostly drew abstract, vibrantly coloured landscape paintings, calling them mindscapes. To artist Richard Mayhew, reality’s essence is more significant than its specifics. His landscape paintings capture the location’s essence rather than its facts. Through a colour-saturated haze, that spirit shimmers; an influence of Abstract Expressionism.
Richard Mayhew painter style is akin to the French Impressionists, whose experiments with colour and light influenced him. During his time as an educator, the colour, shapes, drama, and spirituality of the American West informed his style further. Mayhew used a sparse palette for his landscape paintings in his earlier work, but he started using vibrant colours in the middle of the 1970s.
Richard Mayhew frequently uses a single, unremarkable tree in his emotionally charged landscape paintings. For example, one of Richard Mayhew paintings titled, ‘Morning Bush,’ paints a picture of a dark bush, almost like burnt wood sparkling among the grey sky.
His practice is driven by his gestural technique of splattering paint onto a canvas turning it into vibrant fields of color. Mayhew once remarked, “Landscape has no space, no identity. It enables the painting to focus on feeling.” Delectable saturated colours combine to create shifting light patterns that suggest the passage of time and changing seasons, and the canvases are filled with the glow and ebb of light.
Richard Mayhew’s Personal Life
Artist Richard Mayhew married twice. From his first marriage to Dorothy Zuccarini, he had two children, Ina Mayhew and Scott Mayhew. He later married Rosemary Gibbons. Richard Mayhew died at the age of 100 at his Soquel, California, home on September 26, 2024.
