Working improvisationally and from memory, Richard Mayhew (1924–2024) created an oeuvre of visionary, color-soaked paintings. Neither pure abstractions nor faithful transcriptions of the observed environment, his “mindscapes,” as he termed them, present the landscape as a resonant, psychic space. Mayhew’s practice was a significant intervention in a genre that, in its depiction of nature as extractable resource or conquerable commodity, was essential to American colonialism. Understory surveys his work between 1960, when the artist left New York to study color theory in Florence, Paris, and Amsterdam, and 2023, the year before his death. Throughout these seven decades, Mayhew saw his practice as an artistic reclamation of the land stolen from his Black, Shinnecock, and Cherokee-Lumbee ancestors. “I’m painting Forty Acres and a Mule,” he explained, “I’m painting the treaty land that was never honored for Native Americans.” 

Mayhew was born in Amityville, New York, in 1924. Observing plein air painters on the banks of the South Shore of Long Island, the young Mayhew was fascinated by the way their brushes, which he compared to magic wands, produced images of the scene before them. The presence of followers of the Hudson River School, along with the area’s history of Indigenous dispossession, informed Mayhew’s understanding of landscape as a site of mediation between ownership and expropriation, representation and experience. Living in New York City in the late 1940s, Mayhew was part of the scene that birthed Abstract Expressionism, sitting in on color theory courses with Hans Hofmann, taking classes at the Art Students League, and hanging out at the now-legendary Cedar Bar. At the same time, he remained tethered to the American landscape tradition that he first encountered on Long Island, studying with Edwin Dickinson and Reuben Tam, both of whom took nature as their primary subject, and drawing inspiration from the work of Robert S. Duncanson, an African American painter of the Hudson River School. The latter channeled “the sensitivity of nature,” in Mayhew’s words, that he sought to convey in his own work. In 1960, Mayhew traveled to Europe on a fellowship, studying the Renaissance in Florence and Impressionism in Paris. These pivotal experiences soon cohered into a practice that was not only formally inventive but also challenged how histories of the landscape are metabolized in art.

Back in New York in 1962, Mayhew became increasingly focused on the entanglement of politics and geography in the United States. In response to the 1963 March on Washington, Emma Amos, Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Mayhew, and other Black artists came together as the collective Spiral to contend with art’s role in the struggle for civil rights. While members of Spiral pursued a range of approaches, from modernist abstraction to figurative representations of their communities, Mayhew hewed to nature, firmly believing that the American landscape had much to say about what he called “the blood in the soil.” Built from diffused, scumbled layers in an array of neutral tones, Serenade (1965) exemplifies the atmospheric, poignant works he painted during the decade, inspired in part by a visit to a former plantation in Louisiana during a 1964 road trip along Route 66. Reflecting on the site’s history, Mayhew recalls “looking at the foliage in the trees around the place” and wondering “what happened in that spot over there.” The painting portrays a thicket of trees melting into an ambiguous environment in a Tonalist style that recalls that of nineteenth-century painter George Inness, who, like Mayhew, saw nature as an expressive agent rather than a subject to capture. In Serenade, horizon evanesces into sky, foreclosing perspective and thus the viewer’s ability to imagine moving through the depicted space. Because this terrain can never be known in full, Mayhew painted a scene that could encompass charged histories and potential futures. 

Mayhew’s breakthrough with non-local color came at the end of that transformative decade. Beginning in the early 1970s, he replaced moody ochres and junipers with bright, highly saturated tones. Discernable forms like trees dissolved into delicately calibrated color fields. Even in his most abstract works, however, the landscape is still present—whether in the suggestion of a horizon, subtle tonal shifts indicating dimensionality or topography. Rather than a subdued, Tonalist palette, Mayhew stained Untitled (Abstract Composition) (1975) with a Rothkoesque crimson, its volcanic deluge punctured by glimpses of a watery morass beneath. After this abstract interval, Mayhew returned to integrating more recognizable elements from nature into his compositions while further developing the experimental approach to color he developed in the early 1970s. Flickers of tangerine set a grassy knoll ablaze in Fox Run (1988). Carrying up through the trunks of wavering trees, the hue illuminates the whole scene with a glow that seems to emanate from deep within the canvas. This phosphorescence contrasts starkly with traditional American landscape paintings of the expansionist era, in which light cast from above symbolized God’s sanctioning of Manifest Destiny. A bank of hot-red trees at the top of Southern Border (1999) warps the viewer’s sense of space, their brightness and warmth relative to the lake below pushing them to the front of the picture plane. “I learned how to manipulate the eye,” Mayhew said of his work’s development. “The background’s coming forward and the foreground is receding.” 

In West Bay (2004), which references the body of water near Soquel, the California town where he spent the last three decades of his life, any distinction between background and foreground has disappeared. Sky and sea seem to converge: the image registers both as a stony ocean in upheaval and a mountain peak surrounded by clouds. Mayhew’s translation of landscape into “mindscape,” in part through his command of the optical effects of color, conveys nature’s fundamental ungraspability: always present as a witness to history, but no one’s property. In Wednesday (2023), one of his final works, the shadowy thickets of his early Serenade are incandescent, their bloom into color reflective of his expanded understanding of the American landscape. “Nature’s involved in reinventing itself,” Mayhew explained in 2019. “I’m still trying to paint that feeling.”