Richard Mayhew, a painter of Black and Native American heritage who was known for his explosively colorful abstract landscapes — he called them “mindscapes” — that traced the emotional contours of nature as well as his forebears’ historical relationship to the land, died on Sept. 26 at his home in Soquelgg777, Calif., on the northern coast. He was 100.
His death was confirmed by the Venus Over Manhattan gallery in New York, which represents him.
In his early years as an artist in New York City in the 1950s and ’60s, Mr. Mayhew, a Long Island native, intersected with two midcentury art movements: Abstract Expressionism, which upended the very concept of what a painting could be, and the Spiral Group, a small but influential New York collective of African American artists that sought a new Black aesthetic.
Although he mingled with the likes of Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline at the Cedar Bar (later the Cedar Tavern) in Manhattan, a de facto headquarters for the Abstract Expressionists, he came to reject the movement’s push beyond representational imagery. When “everything’s eliminated,” Mr. Mayhew said in a 2019 oral history interview for the Getty Trust, “you go back to starting from nothing.”
Instead, he turned to a traditionalist genre: landscape painting, which was more fashionable in the mid-19th century than in the mid-20th. But his approach was hardly traditionalist. His landscapes contained elements of the abstract, often relying on an explosion of Day-Glo colors bleeding into each other to form dreamlike tableaux.
“While the paintings are subtly familiar, a sense of mystery and the unknown pervades them,” Mikaela Sardo Lamarche, the director of ACA Galleries, wrote in the catalog to an exhibition of Mr. Mayhew’s work there in 2020. “These are not real, physical locations, nor do they stand still in time. The canvases are imbued with the glow and ebb of light, and delicious saturated colors synthesize to create shifting light patterns that imply the passage of moments in time and changing seasons.”
John Canaday, an influential art critic for The New York Times, described Mr. Mayhew in 1966 as a “nature poet.”
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