The painter Richard Mayhew, who just lately celebrated his 99th birthday, has lived by means of as broad a swath of this nation’s historical past as anybody you would possibly hope to fulfill.
Sitting at a patio desk exterior his cedar-shingled suburban residence in Soquel, close to Santa Cruz, Mayhew leaned again in his chair and mirrored on his lengthy life.
“I drove throughout the USA six occasions,” he stated. “Three over, and three again, from New York to San Francisco. I used to be all the time trying.”
A lifetime spent trying is all Mayhew now wants, by way of reference materials, when he paints within the storage hooked up to the home, listening to jazz so loud, his spouse, Rosemary, informed me, “the entire neighborhood can hear it.” (Mayhew is tough of listening to.) Because the Nineteen Fifties, Mayhew has painted invented landscapes in an more and more unnatural, typically acid palette that may sting and soothe the attention in equal measure.
In 2021, a whole room within the San Francisco Museum of Fashionable Artwork was devoted to Mayhew’s work, six of which have been donated by the collector Pamela Joyner, a stalwart supporter. Regardless of Mayhew’s lengthy profession, many guests have been encountering them there for the primary time.
An exhibition of Mayhew’s work, “Pure Order,” is presently on present at Venus Over Manhattan, inaugurating a brand new house the gallery has opened on Nice Jones Road. In September, a survey of his work will seem on the Sonoma Valley Museum of Artwork in Sonoma, Calif.
To name this late flurry of consideration a rediscovery, nonetheless, is to miss the successes he’s had all through his profession. His work has been proven at a gentle succession of New York galleries for the reason that Nineteen Fifties, together with the venerable Midtown Galleries and, most just lately, ACA Galleries, which continues to symbolize him. In 1970, he was elected a member of the Nationwide Academy of Design.
Mayhew, who has blended African American and Native American ancestry, has a stocky body, a salt and pepper goatee and closely lidded eyes; his speech is punctuated by a compulsive chuckle. Given his age, his vitality and his capability for recalling particulars are astonishing.
In 1942, he was among the many first Black cadets accepted into the U.S. Marines. The ordinarily grueling coaching course of, he remembers, was particularly brutal for Black cadets. “They didn’t need you to make it,” he stated. In 1963, he helped discovered the African American artwork collective Spiral, which included figures equivalent to Romare Bearden and Norman Lewis and debated the potential for an inherently Black aesthetic.
Mayhew grew up in a time when the USA was torn by racial segregation. He was born close to Amityville, on the South Shore of Lengthy Island. “It’s an odd factor,” he stated, “however Amityville was not segregated like different cities at the moment.”
His mom, whom he calls a “flamboyant metropolis woman,” usually disappeared on lengthy journeys to Manhattan. (His “bohemian” father, a home painter who additionally ran a limousine firm, most well-liked to remain residence.) He was raised, as a rule, by his Shinnecock grandmother, who taught him about his Indigenous heritage and took him to powwows.
Mayhew’s Native American id is simply as — if no more — essential to him than his id as an African American. (He feedback that in others’ perceptions of him, the latter usually eclipses the previous.) What he inherited from his Indigenous forebears, he says, shouldn’t be craft custom however “ingenious consciousness.”
Mayhew’s exhibition on the Sonoma Valley Museum of Artwork is titled “Interior Terrain.” When he paints, he describes himself as going right into a trance. He asserts that his work usually are not landscapes however “mindscapes” — locations solely imagined or remembered. Whereas some are titled after particular locations (“Monterey Bay” or “Montauk”), Mayhew stated that he does that “simply to present them some id.” He would possibly simply as effectively name it “Wednesday,” he stated — then confirmed me a portray, on an easel in his garage-studio, titled precisely that.
It’s tempting to try to detect in Mayhew’s hazy, peaceable landscapes an occluded echo of this nation’s historical past of slavery, and the connection of Black and brown staff to the land. In previous titles he has referred to the “40 acres and a mule” that was promised in reparations to freed slaves throughout Reconstruction; in a single interview he described visiting a former plantation in Louisiana, and pondering the darkish secrets and techniques of its panorama.
Nonetheless, he informed me he’s merely dedicated to paint, optics and phantasm. Just like the late Nineteenth-century Tonalist painters (George Innes is a selected affect) he makes use of coloration to conjure house, though he has a perverse predilection for making backgrounds pop ahead and foregrounds recede.
“Once I was learning in Florence,” he stated, “I discovered that the thoughts doesn’t know what the attention is seeing.” In 1960, along with his first spouse, Dorothy, and their youngsters Ina and Scott, Mayhew decamped to Italy, the place he studied on the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. His finest pal on the time was Nelson Shanks, the Classical Realist portrait painter, with whom he visited museums all through Europe.
The sojourn taught him, he stated, that inventive sensibility “has nothing to do with ethnicity or any explicit tradition.” He contends that “inventive consciousness” (a time period he makes use of usually) was what the members of Spiral have been actually concerned with, greater than points tied to race.
Mayhew turned acknowledged as a radical trainer, pushing an interdisciplinary curriculum — one which some artwork departments weren’t prepared for. Instructing at Sonoma State College within the Nineteen Seventies, he constructed along with his college students a large plastic bubble, inflated by a field fan, wherein he carried out courses, inviting dancers and musicians to carry out inside it and scientists to measure the reverberations on its pores and skin.
Mayhew’s accomplishments at the moment are inspiring youthful artists of coloration. The 38-year-old African American painter Kajahl, who lives close to Mayhew in Santa Cruz, will curate the exhibition in Sonoma with Shelby Graham. He first met Mayhew whereas in highschool, by means of a safety guard who observed his artwork. Kajahl has since change into one thing of an acolyte. “I got here up in a time when artists felt so incentivized to push politics or notions of their collective id,” he stated. “I discover it refreshing that his work isn’t about any of that.”
Rosemary, his spouse, informed me that he tends to not dwell on the hardships he has endured, the discrimination he confronted. She guesses that this is perhaps a type of self-protection. “I didn’t have struggles!” he protested to her just lately, pointing to the willingness of galleries to indicate his work.
“We did wrestle,” stated Ina, Mayhew’s daughter, a manufacturing designer for movie and tv. “There have been all the time monetary points, we moved rather a lot, he taught at plenty of colleges. He had galleries, however we didn’t reside off the sale of his work.” Some collectors, she stated, didn’t even know Mayhew was not white. “When he received accepted to the Nationwide Academy of Design, they didn’t know he was Black till he confirmed up!”
There have been many artists of coloration who’ve had not solely to assume exterior the field however to invent a wholly new field for themselves. Regardless of his outwardly conventional subject material, there is no such thing as a artist fairly like Richard Mayhew. As Rosemary places it, “I feel Rick found out what he wanted to do to outlive.”
Richard Mayhew: Pure Order
By June 17, Venus Over Manhattan, 39 Nice Jones Road, NoHo; venusovermanhattan.com.
