The centennial man: Visionary painter Richard Mayhew reaches a milestone

On Wednesday, April 3, a man in Soquel will reach 100 … as in years of age: triple digits, the centennial, the Big Benny, the roundest of round numbers.

Given that only one in roughly 3,700 Americans ever get to their 100th birthday, such a life is already exceptional. But in the case of the man from Soquel, his life is extraordinary in ways that have nothing to do with longevity. In fact, he is among the most prominent and well-respected people on a national level in his field who happens to live in Santa Cruz County. He is an accomplished and celebrated artist, a painter of unique sensibility and vision, a figure of such stature in the art world that The New York Times afforded him a long and comprehensive feature story on the occasion of his turning 99 last spring. 

He is Richard Mayhew.

As his personal odometer trips 100, Mayhew is also the subject of a fascinating art show called “Inner Terrain” on the third-floor gallery of the Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz. Next week, the MAH will host a reception to mark the painter’s 100th birthday. 

What makes Mayhew special as an artist? For starters, he is of Black and Indigenous ethnic heritage, a fact that not only shaped his life as an American navigating the 20th century, but helped give his art its characteristic texture and perspective. In 1963, then on the cusp of 40, Mayhew helped start a short-lived but seminal New York art collective made up exclusively of African American artists known as Spiral, which endeavored, in the wake of the civil rights movement, to establish a distinct Black aesthetic in the art world. 

But mostly, he’s known for his work, landscapes that dance daringly close to pure abstraction, explosions of deep and dramatic color that don’t so much depict as suggest trees and grasses and landforms. They are landscapes that are not so much attempting to reflect the realism of the natural world but rather trying to capture the psychological experience of seeing.

I had the privilege of visiting Mayhew at the Soquel home he shares with his wife, Rosemary. He was buoyant and jovial, punctuating his insights about art with a knowing chuckle. 

“Does the mind know what the eye sees?” he asked with a mischievous glint in his eye. Mayhew is originally from Long Island and he likes to tell the story of traveling by car back and forth from New York to California several times over the course of his lifetime, gazing at the landscapes of America’s interior. As a painter, he doesn’t set up an easel on, say, a cliff overlooking the ocean in Capitola, plein air style. Nor does he bother with photographs. He works from his memory, or “inside out,” as he likes to put it. His paintings come not only from his own mental images of landscapes he remembers, but the mood and vibe of the moment when he sits down in front of his canvas. 

“It comes from an emotional sensitivity to nature reinventing itself,” he said. “And, honestly, a lot of improvisation. I was a jazz singer at one time.”

Mayhew has made his home in Santa Cruz County for more than 30 years now, having first discovered the area while teaching at San Jose State University in the mid-1970s. 

The Santa Cruz-based painter and artist Kajahl served as co-curator of Mayhew’s “Inner Terrain” show. Kajahl’s own artwork is nothing like Mayhew’s. In fact, Mayhew’s deepest influence on the younger artist was his insistence on being true to his unique artistic vision.

“The richness of his work,” said Kajahl of Mayhew, “is influenced by something more internal. He’s somebody who walks to the beat of his own drum. He was never swayed by what was happening in the external world, or what was happening politically around him, or anything of that nature. It was something that always came from an inward expression. And that’s something that really rubbed off on me and I could take as an inspiration.”

Kajahl first encountered Mayhew 20 years ago as a student at Santa Cruz High School. As a young art student, he had never met a working artist before meeting Mayhew. But the two men of different generations hit it off. Mayhew had famously studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, Italy, back in the 1960s. Almost 50 years later, Kajahl was a student at the same institution (Mayhew’s purchase of one of Kajahl’s paintings helped the younger artist attend the prestigious school). Later, he earned a master of fine arts degree at Hunter College in New York, where Mayhew taught a few decades before.

More recently, Mayhew was giving a talk sponsored by the NAACP at M.K. Contemporary Art, the gallery on Front Street next to the MAH. During his talk, he casually pointed out Kajahl in the audience, praising the younger man’s work. Kajahl had only recently moved back to Santa Cruz at the time. After the talk, he was approached by Santa Cruz photographer and writer Shelby Graham. 

“She said, ‘I have the opportunity to curate this show [of Mayhew’s work],’” said Kajahl, “‘And I don’t want to do it alone. Would you think about doing this with me?’ And funnily enough, I had been thinking of doing a show with Richard.”

Thus was born “Inner Terrain,” which was originally designed for the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art in downtown Sonoma, and mounted last fall. The Sonoma show closed in January, moving down to the MAH in Santa Cruz (though the MAH show is roughly only half as big as the Sonoma show). 

Mayhew’s own primary influence is the 19th-century New York landscape painter George Inness. He was also an ex-military mate and lifelong friend of celebrated portrait painter Nelson Shanks. But it was in Italy where Mayhew developed his sophisticated understanding of color and optics and was first drawn into the complex psychological interplay among color, shape and perception. 

In our conversation, Mayhew often used the word “illusion” to characterize both his training and his later artworks, as if he enjoys playing the role of trickster in his imagery. His paintings use contrasting colors and shapes to suggest psychological states. 

“He likes to call them ‘mindscapes’ or ‘moodscapes,’” said co-curator Graham of Mayhew’s art. “He really likes to point to the essence of things, which can be interpreted as a kind of illusion. And he really is a master at color theory and optics. So he plays with our eyes, the way he’ll put complementary colors next to each other, and one pops forward while the other moves to the background. Sometimes, he’ll do just a suggestion of a shadow and we see the depth in it. He’s really good. He knows what he’s doing.”

Mayhew talks a lot about his Native American family lines and their influence on his life and art, drawing inspiration from the Shinnecock and the Lumbee people, both of which he claims as an ethnic heritage. His longevity, he said, is no mere coincidence. Both his parents lived past 90. 

On turning 100, Mayhew said with a laugh, “I can’t imagine it. Someone asks me how old I am and I always just say 80.”

Richard Mayhew’s “Inner Terrain” is currently on display at the Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz, through May 12. The MAH will host a First Friday celebration of Richard Mayhew’s 100th birthday on April 5, from 6 to 8 p.m.

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