The late artist Richard Mayhew anchored his century-long life to the place the place water meets land. Born on Lengthy Island’s South Shore in 1924, he handed away this previous September in Soquel, California, on Monterey Bay’s northern shore. His luminous, color-saturated physique of work, which he referred to as “mindscapes,” fuse imagined landscapes and emotional terrains. Embedded with reminiscence, they’re meditations on his personal and his Indigenous and African-American ancestors’ relationship to land.
A brand new gallery present at Venus Over Manhattan in New York Metropolis, Richard Mayhew: Watercolor, brings collectively 22 of the painter’s radiant and atmospheric work. Pulsing with eye-popping shade, these works are rendered within the artist’s signature showstopping palette, which dances from moody earth tones to riotous, electric-sorbet shades (suppose: chartreuse, vermillion, lavender, mauve, magenta, and each shade of citrus). These works on paper showcase Mayhew’s singular command of shade and his deftness in translating his inventive imaginative and prescient throughout mediums, from slow-oxidizing oil paints — the fabric utilized in a lot of his most-exhibited work — to, right here, the fast-drying immediacy of watercolors. Notably, most of those work (all however two) are being exhibited for the primary time.
This exhibition, accompanied by a full-color exhibition catalogue, is a follow-up to Richard Mayhew: Pure Order, proven on the gallery final yr, and the primary present devoted solely to the artist’s watercolors in about twenty years. This month marks one other milestone for Mayhew’s watercolors: The Museum of Trendy Artwork in New York Metropolis confirmed that it acquired its first portray by the artist, a watercolor and pastel piece titled “Monterey Blues Series V” (1994), which was displayed in Pure Order. The practically two dozen watercolors on show on this new present span roughly the final third of Mayhew’s life, from 1990 by way of 2024.
Richard Mayhew, “Time Space – No. 6” (2003), watercolor on paper; 18 x 24 inches (45.7 × 61 cm)
Because it turned out, that is additionally the final present the artist had a hand in planning. In keeping with the gallery, Mayhew personally picked out every bit, arranging the choice in his storage, and painted new works expressly for this presentation throughout what turned out to be the ultimate months of his life. Watercolor, due to this fact, additionally serves as the primary posthumous exhibition of Mayhew’s artwork, a poignant tribute to his creative legacy.
Communing with Mayhew’s late-in-life inventive labors at this second in time was deeply transferring. Once I heard concerning the artist’s passing, I occurred to be visiting California. Reflecting on my dialog with him for a 2020 profile and remembering the joyous manner he had burst into music mid-interview, I bee-lined to SFMOMA to be within the presence of his artwork, as an act of remembrance. Standing earlier than the glowing forest scene rendered in oil in “Nyack” (1975), figuring out Mayhew was not among the many residing, I felt a renewed and visceral understanding of the non secular layers of his work. My eyes adopted the portray’s rust-orange path by way of a subject in direction of a patch of sunshine past the treeline, as if following a path from one facet of life to the opposite. Again in New York, the contemporary white partitions and quiet calm of the gallery house took on a equally hallowed aura, like an artwork chapel.
Richard Mayhew, “Untitled” (2020), watercolor on paper, 11 x 15 inches (27.9 x 38.1 cm)
Richard Mayhew, “Untitled” (undated), watercolor, graphite on paper, 22 x 34 inches (55.9 x 86.4 cm)
Richard Mayhew: Watercolor continues at Venus Over Manhattan (39 Nice Jones Road, Noho, Manhattan), by way of January 18, 2025. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
