Richard Mayhew (1924 – 2024) was an American landscape painter, illustrator, and arts educator of Native and African American descent.Mayhew studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, the Art Students League of New York, and Columbia University. His abstract landscapes, which he called mindscapes, convey inner states and feelings through evocative color, diffused forms, and atmospheric space.These mindscape paintings have an ethereal quality to them, in which swaths of color blend into each other.At times, they are electric shocks of violet, magenta, neon green, pink, and goldenrod, resembling negatives for color photographs. In other canvases, they are hazier tones of the same shade that bleed into each other.Mayhew intersected with two midcentury art movements: Abstract Expressionism, which upended the very concept of what a painting could be, and the creation of the Spiral Group, a small but influential New York collective of African American artists that sought a new Black aesthetic.These dialogues solidified his commitment to exploring abstraction and landscape painting in conjunction with race and identity.In the decades since, Mayhew lived, painted, and taught throughout the country including in New York, Pennsylvania and California.

More of Richard Mayhew’s colorful paintings can be found at https://www.richardmayhew.net/.