When I was studying art history in Avignon, heart of Provence and the Côte de Rhone wine region, my classmates would sometimes roll their eyes at my affection for landscape painting. They would admit that their area was beautiful, indeed, with its vineyards, olive groves, and lavender fields. However, landscape painting was rather passée, though (eye-roll) always very popular with “les américains.” Well yes, we like landscape paintings, and while France is literally a garden, it doesn’t have the landscape that we have in North America. There is no vastness, no trajectory from soft low mountains across endless prairies to high rugged peaks. There is no southwestern desert, an area so unique that one could believe it came from some other planet and simply smashed into and melded with a primodial Earth. Yet, when I looked at France and how over the centuries, the people had always looked at and worked with the landscape to make France that garden I spoke of, I saw a common human link. We are all tied to the land. It is us, and we are it.
As one looks at this painting, it is easy to see why it is called Spiritual Retreat #1. It has the dreamlike quality of a meditation. One does not walk physically in such a space, but rather lets the mind wander over these grasses and hills, taking in the soothing greens, the dark trees and their shadows, and that promising golden horizon. The artist rightly calls these paintings, “mindscapes” because they are his imagination’s interpretations of the environment sent back to the world in a poetically painted remix. It was French Impressionist, Edgar Degas, who responded to the plein air painters of his day by saying, “A painting is above all the product of the artist’s imagination,” and that “A painting needs a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy.” All of that applies to Richard Mayhew’s art.
The painting above, Spring Series #1 is bursting with life. The colors are bold and vibrant. Shades of different colors burst out in wavy forms. They are blurred by the speed with which they are growing. Bright yellow against deep greens, feathery light blue stokes against an inky blue-black roerschach image of trees, then more bright yellow. Yet, this less is solid as it melts into the pale pink touches of the atmosphere. The painting takes the viewer into the creative energy that bursts forth from the land when the growing season starts. Winter is over, and Spring is here to produce all kinds of new living things.
Richard Mayhew took on the landscape and made it his primary statement on art, even as the art of 20th century America was turning the world upside down with its abstract expressionism. Mayhew comes from Amityville, Long Island in New York. African-American and Native-American (Cherokee on his mother’s side and Shinnacock on his father’s), he took his inspiration from the land around him, which he interpreted with his use of colors and dreamlike shapes to express the emotion of the scene rather than any physical actuality. In fact, Mayhew often starts just putting colors on the canvas, and works those until he finds his painting. Though what he “finds” always relates to memory, dreams, emotions, and imagination based upon what he has seen in the land.
I spoke above about the attitude overseas toward landscape painting as a modern genre, but the U.S. also provided Mayhew with such obstacles. Not only was abstract expressionism the movement of his time, Black-American artists were always seen in terms of social realism and depictions of Black-American life and history in the United States. So how would a piece like Santa Fe Trail, with its soft red earth and softer red sky fit into the box that had been established for Black artists? These two items, social attitudes really, were to plague Mayhew in the early part of his career, until Spiral.
Spiral was a think tank for Black artists that came out of the 1963 March on Washington. Its founders, Romare Bearden, Hale Woodruff, Norman Lewis, Emma Amos, Felrath Hines, some of whom were from the days of the Harleem Renaissance, sought to tackle the conundrum of whether Black artists should “aspire to be part of the mainstream or was their challenge to honor more directly the stories of African-American life?” (Walker, Transcendence, p.9). Hale Woodruff put it simply as keeping one’s work at the highest quality of development while “conveying a telling quality about what we are as a people.” (p.9). In other words, the high quality was a must but also the expression of authentic diversity within a community.
Mayhew’s landscape paintings and Norman Lewis’ beautiful abstract expressionist work (see “Beyond Black: The Paintings of Norman Lewis…” ofartandwine.com), were definitely expressions of the diversity of thought within the Black arts community. However, such outliers often win against all odds and create sprouts of new and visually exciting things. In the case of Lewis and Mayhew, their paintings sprang up in between the accustomed work like stray flowers growing out of the cracks in the cement.
Mayhew had studied in Europe in the early 60s with both a Ford and a Whitney grant. He became quite a skilled portraitist, but he always returned to landscape. In Concerto, he paints according to the definition of a musical piece in three parts, where a concert orchestra supports the individual work of a single instrument (a violin, piano, cello, or flute). The painting’s two hillsides and the vibrant yellow and violet background are the three parts. The mass of trees and foliage do the heavy lifting of the concert orchestra that lets the ethereal beauty of the violet and gold atmosphere rise like the notes of a solo flute.
In a painting like Rhapsody, Mayhew follows in paint the musical format of a rhapsody: spontaneaous inspiration and improvisation with highly contrasted moods, colors, and tonality. The deep, inky, blue-violet stand of trees contrasted against a deep pink sky is a burst of freedom, as though the paint wanted to run away and in the process created the outline of some trees.
As can be seen by the names of his paintings involving music, Mayhew liked to bring in elements from other arts. In his teaching career, he sometimes found himself the outsider in the traditional art department. He was a believer in interdisciplinary studies as an approach to art, which many places did not quite understand. His work with creative consciousness involving all aspects of life was laughable to the strict technical skills disciplinarians at some art schools. He found a more receptive atmosphere at Sonoma State University which enabled him to complete his work in interdisciplinary studies. After receiving his degrees, he went to Penn State where he taught from 1977 to 1991 and created an interdisciplinary program there.
Mayhew’s work was represented in New York City at the Midtown Gallery for 20-30 years before he moved to the ACA Gallery, with which he has had a long and beneficial relationship. He mentions the struggles of his artist friend, Norman Lewis, who was represented by Willard Gallery along with other “mystical” painters. Mayhew says of the relationship, “Like me and my ‘mindscapes,’ Norman’s abstraction was about the uniqueness of self. We just had different sensibilities.” (Transcendence, p. 19).
In Atascadero, a more recent painting made since Mayhew’s move to retire in California, a calm loveliness emanates from the painting. The foreground, a soft yellowish brown, is smooth and undistrubed, no rocks, no patches of grass, just earth. Beyond the boundary of the trees, there is a light green that looks as though some stray ray of sunlight illuminates it, making the viewer want to go there. If one’s imagination walked through the opening in the trees to that patch of light green, there is the promise of a far away vista of blue mountains and limitless sky. This image from the mind of Richard Mayhew is a testament to his life-long connection to the land and his desire to present his authentic vision of it.
This is Richard Mayhew, a 96-year-old artist who still paints and shares his vision of the world through his works. For more on the artist, watch this video. “What Color is Love?” youtube.com. And for a special treat watch this snippet from the celebration of Mayhew’s art held in 2014 at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora. youtube.com
Images for this post are used in accordance with Fair Use Policy for purposes of review, critique and discussion. All works © Richard Mayhew.
Sources for this article are as follows:
“Atascadero. Petrucci Family Foundation” pffcollection.com
“Richard Mayhew Show Awards in the Hamptons” news.artnet.com
Transcendence, Richard Mayhew, with essay by Andrew Walker. Chronicle Books
For more on Marjorie Vernelle, see the author page at amazon.com/author/marjorievernelle or go to the Art Blog at vernellestudio.com
Black-American Vintners
Well, might as well start this discussion off with someone who has made a stellar career in the wine trade. He will tell you in his TED talk, “How to be a Black Sheep” (youtube.com) that his switch in the early 2000s from working in high finance to being a sommelier and winemaker was a giant leap of faith. He wanted to bring the hip-hop energy to winemaking and do it in a unique way. Mack chose not to grow his own grapes, but to purchase various yields from growers then blend them into his signature wines that have names like “Bottoms Up,” “Horsehoes and Handgrenades,” “Love Drunk,” and “Other People’s Pinot Noir.” His brand is Maison Noir, a change from the original name of Mouton Noir (Black Sheep), and if you want to see him go through a variety of wine tastings, each with a different subject and intent, just go to this link for a selection of instructive and fun videos (youtube.com).
However, the first Black-American wine maker in the U.S. was John June Lewis, Sr., who became enamoured of wine making during his stay in France in World War I. He inherited land in Virgina in 1933 and by 1940, he opened Woburn Winery, the first Black-owned winery in the United States (see blackwinemakersstory.com). Though it took some years, Lewis was not to be alone, as New Orleans business woman, Ires Rideau, bought 6 acres in California’s Santa Ynez Valley in 1989 and later expanded to 24 acres to form Rideau Vineyard. She grew Rhone varietals and blended them to complement the Creole style cooking that represented her Black and Creole heritage. Though she is no longer the owner, Rideau Vineyard still exists and specializes in “hand-crafted wines” (rideauvineyard.com).
The Napa Valley is the home of The Brown Estate, which is run by three siblings, on land purchased by their parents in 1985. The Brown Estate started by selling grapes to other winemakers, but in 1995 the two sisters and their brother started making wine themselves. By 2002, Wine Spectator did a special article on them and their Zinfandel wine. They continue to produce Zinfandel, Chardonnay, and Merlot.
The entrepreneurship involved sometimes has an international flavor, as in the McBride sisters, who are stationed in Monterey, California and Marlborough, New Zealand. Their Black-owned and woman-owned wine company focuses on sustainability and inclusivity in the wine industry. Their company, Black Girl Magic Wines encourages consumers to support Black-owned vintners. mcbridesisters.com
And to top it all off, Journey Between the Vines: The Black Winemakers’ Story is a documentary that takes one through the story of award-winning Black winemakers, with an eye to disrupting the stereotypes about who can be a successful winemaker. For more on that see youtube.com and documentary.org
And there is plenty more, such as the Association of African-American Vintners and articles in vinepair.com “Ten African-American Winemakers Everyone Should Know” and in Wine Spectator on the association mentioned above winespectator.com. While the road has been an uphill climb, the future is bright for both the vintners and the consumers.
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©marjorie vernelle 2022
Coming Soon: Observing the Observed in La Loge, and Women Winemakers.
Not unlike Edouard Manet’s Belle Epoque masterpiece Bar at the Folies Bérgére, Mary Cassatt, an American painter in the Impressionist era, took note of what was happening around her when she went out on the town for an evening in Paris. The painting tells quite a story. Cassatt was not the only female impressionists painters, as even one of the artist’s models got to display her paintings at the Salon.