richard Mayhew

Richard Mayhew is well-known for his vibrant, emotionally evocative landscape paintings. Mayhew’s creative process is gestural, facilitated through pouring paint onto a canvas and working it into lush fields of color. Each color is intentionally suggestive, depicting an emotional interpretation of desire, hope, fear, love, and other emotions that Mayhew feels as he creates. 

“Landscape has no space, no identity,” Mayhew once said. “It allows the painting to be about emotion.” - Richard Mayhew

Throughout his teenage years, Mayhew made trips into New York City to study the works of the American and European masters on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was a student at the Brooklyn Museum’s Art School, with additional courses at Pratt Institute and Columbia, in the 1940s. He was greatly influenced by the wave of Abstract Expressionism that had begun taking over as the first homegrown American art movement.

Mayhew was also a member of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and the legendary artist group, Spiral, a New York-based collective of African-American artists formed in the 1960s by artists Charles Alston, Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, and Hale Woodruff. The collective was initially formed in response to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963. The group was active between 1963 and 1965, meeting weekly to discuss the role of African American artists in the Civil Rights movement and the shifting landscape of American art, culture, and politics. 

In 1963, Mayhew began teaching at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and Pratt Institute, later becoming a recognized educator for the Art Students League, Smith College, and Pennsylvania State University. He was inducted into the National Academy of Art in 1969/1970. His work is represented in major collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the de Young Museum, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.