Although many viewers describe Richard Mayhew’s paintings as landscapes, he resists that designation. Mayhew’s pursuit of art began upon the traditional path marked by the Hudson River school’s renowned landscape painters, yet his eyes and spirit provoked him to explore the limitless connections between humanity and nature. For over four decades, he has absorbed and then committed to canvas the magnificence that nature communicates—the dynamic colors, elaborate textures and atmospheric illusions. 

“How do you interpret landscape with a feeling?” Mayhew asks. “Many of my so-called landscapes are very abstract because they are very free-form; I am involved with the spiritual feeling of space. Just to work with figures would be very limiting because that would identify a particular place or situation. The paintings look like landscapes but that is not necessarily my preoccupation in painting. 

“I began working with abstract expressionists because they are involved with the emotional expression in painting. That emotional expression came out with the thick application and spontaneous application of the paint. But I wanted something more than that, so 1 became more involved with the forms of nature, but not necessarily with landscapes. My art is based on a feeling—of music and mood and sensitivity and the audio responses of sound and space. I want the essence of the inner soul to be on the canvas.”

Mayhew’s reverence for the land and sea was established during his early years in his native Amityville, a small hamlet on Long Island. His father, Alvin Mayhew, was of African-American and Shinnecock Indian descent; his mother, Lillian Goldman Mayhew, was the product of a Cherokee Indian and African-American ancestry. The artist’s grandmother, Sarah Steele Mayhew, taught him the “nature lore, ways and attitudes” of American Indians, from which his early appreciation of creation was born. The brave alliance between his African-American and Indian ancestors was illuminated when Mayhew learned the part that the Shinnecock played in the Underground Railroad: Tribe members ferried Canada-bound runaways across Long Island Sound and into Connecticut. 

Mayhew and his brother Alver often went along with their father, an avid fisherman, when he left home at dawn to cast his lines. Such experiences, combined with his grandmother’s teachings, would deepen the young Mayhew’s spiritual regard for earth, water, light and sky. Long Island Sound’s somber mystique instilled in him a feeling that was both stimulating and sobering. During the summers, artists from New York City would visit the sound, taking refuge from the metropolis’s bustle and heat to paint at the seashore. For the visiting artists, the resort town of Amityville was a quiet country retreat. Mayhew looked forward to the artists’ arrival each year and enjoyed seeing their easels positioned in the grass and sand. Several of the visitors were influenced by the Hudson River school of painters, who were dedicated to capturing the quietude and the changing moods of nature. 

Mayhew recalls being “fascinated by the artists dipping their brushes into the paint like a magic wand and by the images coming out on the end of it.” His father painted houses and signs for a living, and Mayhew secretly began using his father’s paints and brushes to explore his artistic impulses. Mayhew’s curiosity about their work intrigued the artists that he watched along the sound, and when he was 14, one of them invited him to show what he could do. From this point on, Mayhew would enjoy the encouragement of these artists, and he would join them regularly to conduct his own first experiments. 

When not keeping company with the artists, Mayhew learned more about painting by perusing copies of Apollo Magazine, a British publication that his grandmother brought home from work. He retreated often to the attic, where the magazines were stored, to avoid household chores and to while away hours immersed in a world of art and antiques. As a teenager he took day trips into New York City to visit galleries and museums. He immersed himself in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he discovered the works of Rembrandt and of the American landscapists. 

By the time he was about 17 years old, Mayhew realized that he wished to become an artist. In 1945, he moved to New York City and began seeking work as an illustrator. Children’s books, porcelain and medical journals all provided him with a means of support. Medical illustrator James Wilson Peale had been a mentor to Mayhew during several summers in Amityville, and this influence would remain: In addition to frequenting the city’s art institutions, Mayhew studied the detailed replication of anatomies, organs and tissues. He frequented the New York Academy of Medicine, where he studied the anatomical renderings of Leonardo da Vinci and Andreas Vesalius.

New York City presented Mayhew with other creative outlets as well. He spent evenings singing with jazz combos and performing with dramatic groups. In 1951, he began taking courses at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, where he studied with the painters Ruben Tam, Edwin Dickman, Hans Hofmann, Gregorio Prestopino and Max Beckman. When Dickman moved on to the Art Students League, Mayhew followed; he also took courses at the Pratt Institute and obtained a degree in art history from Columbia University. 

After a series of presentations in group shows, Mayhew was given his first solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1955; his second one-man show was presented in 1957 at the Morris Gallery in Greenwich Village. His work’s debut was well-received; his evocative use of color, light and form caused critics to make comparisons with French impressionist Claude Monet and with the American painter Winslow Homer. 

In 1958, Mayhew spent a season at the MacDowell Colony, and later that year, a John Hay Whitney Fellowship enabled him to continue his studies in Europe. He elected to study painting at the Academia in Florence, Italy. He remained at the academy forayear, and then, bolstered by a grant from the Ford Foundation, spent two years traveling throughout Europe, visiting its great museums and devouring the works of the masters. 

“The teachers that I had worked with told me that I should broaden my horizons, have other influences, go to Europe and maybe study there,” Mayhew says. “They told me that being away from my own environment would enable me to be more objective about who I was and where I was.

“I was studying American impressionists, but I went to Europe and studied French impressionists and actually the Italian Renaissance painters. Then I went to Holland and studied Rembrandt and that whole school of Dutch painters and Flemish painters. I studied color when I was over there and I was quite involved with that. During that time I also read a German book about color optics, and that got me involved in thinking about color and its influence on the psyche. I went to the Louvre in Paris; I visited the Prado in Spain. 

“I was trying to be exposed as much as possible to European painting. All I knew was what I had read about these artists, but actually seeing their work was something else again. I wasn’t copying what they were doing, but I was learning from their color, their design and their composition. I was mesmerized by everything. I was also trying to get a sense of artists who were interpreting their lifestyles at the time, their environments Rembrandt and van Gogh, how they were painting in their time periods and were influenced by their cultural existences. Later on, this was very good for me, because as a teacher I utilized the idea of the artist as reflective of the social development of the time.” 

The impressionists had a special influence upon Mayhew, and while he focused on color analysis and theory he also explored texture, line and tonal techniques. He studied atmospheric perspective and became absorbed in the natural phenomena of light and reflective light. The density of the atmosphere in Europe is heavier than in the United States, he says, so that when bright sunlight hits objects on the landscape, it changes them to purple and to blue-green and creates multicolor hazes in the sky: “You get that strange kind of light; it’s almost a rainbow effect.”

Living abroad influenced Mayhew in other significant ways. In Europe, he felt that he had an identity: He was an artist. When he returned to the United States, he reсognized that this identification was lost. “Artists had a tradition, and their lifestyle was part of their culture,” he says of the European artists he observed. “Americans did not have this culture. The artists were outsiders in American culture and were not embraced by society as a whole.” 

Upon returning to the United States in 1962, he witnessed a societal transformation that echoed his dissatisfaction. The civil rights movement had begun its political challenge of racism and discriminatory policies. More than ever, the era’s artists and other intellectuals felt compelled to lend their voices and talents to the movement’s outcry. Mayhew painted while teaching courses at the Brooklyn Museum, at Pratt Institute, and, during the late 1960s, at the Art Students League. His art did not take on the Afrocentric symbols that would become a part of the freedom movement, yet he was determined to play a part. 

Mayhew’s appreciation of art’s spiritual elements and its political potential collided in 1963, when he joined several other artists to form the Spiral Group. Initiated by painters Romare Bearden and Norman Lewis, this artists’ think tank held its first meeting just before the historic March on Washington. For about two years, Spiral’s 15 members—-among them Hale Woodruff, Charles Alston, James Yeargans, Felrath Hines, Alvin Hollingsworth, Merton Simpson, Emma Amos and Reginald Gammon—assembled weekly in one of the artists’ studios or at 147 Christopher St. in Greenwich Village.

Together, the members of Spiral discussed their artistic processes, existences and purposes; they challenged and stimulated one another’s thinking. The group’s debates centered on the merits of their individual creative endeavors and how their work as artists could assist the struggle. for civil rights. The movement of a spiral—outward and constantly upward, embracing all directions—inspired the group’s name. The impact of European art upon their creations was a topic that dominated many of the Spiral group’s discussions. Mayhew recognized that because of colonialism, Europeans had left their imprint upon Asia, the Americas and Africa and that all of the peoples from these areas therefore shared some form of Europeanized heritage. Lewis, on the other hand, was concerned with creative spiritual expression; when challenged about his abstract expressionist work, he maintained that black artists should be allowed to paint anything—-and in whatever style—-they chose. Of course, the debate produced a wide range of opinions. Lewis and Mayhew elected to remain abstract expressionists, but Bearden reevaluated his approach, which, in the end, became centered on the black figure. 

From the beginning of his career, Mayhew has examined the spiritual aspects of nature while perfecting the creative act of painting. This is the reason that he does not view himself as a landscape painter, but rather as an artist who investigates the shapes, colors and tonalities that he experiences daily. He commits each impression to memory like a Zen master until the time arrives to reveal them on paper or canvas. His creative process is therefore twofold: He experiences through sight and feeling and then selectively interprets that experience through paint. The geographic setting of a landscape does not dictate the location of the paintings that he creates. Working only from memory, and not from drawings or photographs, Mayhew allows his brush to guide his artistic directions. Therefore he might be physically in Santa Cruz, but in an Albuquerque state of mind. 

When he was younger, he painted his grandmother as a landscape. As he recalls it, he “painted her sensitivity.” He found figure painting too limiting because it dictated what things were, their sizes, the amount of space taken up, and how much of it was left in the picture plane. Mayhew believes that if you don’t know the size of a thing, you are not bothered by how much space it occupies. Now, whenever viewers ask where the figure can be found in one of his paintings, he responds, “You’re the figure.” 

Most often viewers are astounded by his sense of color—from the atmospheric qualities enhanced by his exposure to the Hudson River school to the tonalities learned from the impressionists to the large bright splashes of color influenced by the color field painters. His visual renderings are involved with the emotional and spiritual qualities that he can achieve through color and surface application and by moving back and forth among watercolors, oil paints and pastels. 

Operating within a spiritual realm presents a constant search and a challenge: How can the feeling of nature be interpreted on canvas? In “Blue Breeze” (1997), the viewer is drawn into the blueness of leafy patterns until released by the orange sky that surrounds them. Such works are emotional abstractions of physical existence, characterized by subtle tonalities that bring harmony to the elements of the landscape so that they seem to merge into one another. Diffused forms, particularly trees, are recognizable although abstracted, allowing viewers to connect them with places they have seen or wish to experience.

Mayhew often invites the viewer into these paintings by means of a path or waterway that seems less traveled. In “Sacred Path” (1998), he uses a yellow-orange path with bright splotches of pinkish growth along its sides. The path narrows beyond the blue-violet trees; the hues darken. Since it is a sacred path, the question arises: Will the darker hues threaten our faith, or will our spiritual connection with our surroundings endure and overtake our fears? 

In works such as “Sonata in G Minor” (1987), he marries music and paint, laying down his palette knife strokes to classical, jazz and hip-hop music. Creating a visual equivalent of music has been a recurring theme in modern and contemporary painting. Saying that in this regard Wassily Kandinsky was ahead of his time, Mayhew also cites Stuart Davis and Romare Bearden, who favored listening to jazz while painting. Meanwhile he mentions jazz musicians-for example, Miles Davis, who explored the relationship of painting to his music. And one of Mayhew’s series of works was inspired by the compositions of Cecil Taylor, one of his favorite musicians. 

After retiring from his professor emeritus position at Pennsylvania State University in 1991, Mayhew returned to Santa Cruz, Calif., where he had spent time on a sabbatical. In this seaside town, wedged between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Cruz Mountains, he now lives, works and feels at home. Each day the rivers, streams, ocean, parks and deserts of central California excite his imagination. 

“It’s all here,” Mayhew says. “The weather is here, and it’s right on the ocean.” For Mayhew, the affinity to the extraordinary terrain of Santa Cruz is reminiscent of the relationship he once had with his hometown of Amityville. The nearby regions of Sausalito and Capitola also have appeared on his canvases, as has the momentous beauty of Big Sur. For Mayhew, the challenge to create continues. He travels to New York every three months to visit family and friends and to get an infusion of live music, theater and dance. “I try to see everything that’s happening,” he says. “It’s part of the joy. I like New York, but I like it out here because of the peace.” He remembers when he sold his first painting and realized that he could make a living doing something that was a challenge and that he loved. In a way, he used to feel embarrassed and guilty, because this was not the work ethic that he was taught to pursue as a youth. Yet his was and is a joyful experience.