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- [Steven] We're in the Georgia Museum of Art
looking at this gorgeous painting by Richard Mayhew
called "Indigenous Spiritual Space, series number seven."
- [Shawnya] In many ways, it encompasses a lot of periods
in the history of art in terms of landscape painting,
abstraction, impressionism.
The artist is reconciling a lot of important movements
as well as inserting a biographical note
in the reference to indigenous spaces.
- [Steven] The artist does trace his lineage
back to the Cherokee and back to the Shinnecock.
But this explosion of color seems to me
to be referencing a landscape in his adopted California,
not Long Island, where he'd spent
the earlier part of his life
- [Shawnya] This explosion of blue and orange and green,
not necessarily something that you'd see, pallette-wise,
in traditional landscape painting.
It's almost like he's trying to evoke landscape in general
but also a certain mood that the colors help to produce.
- [Steven] For all of the brightness
of the colors of this painting,
it's a canvas that I enter into quietly
and it gives me space to move through.
- [Shawnya] What he's getting at
is entering mentally into a space,
not necessarily knowing what it is
and being able to identify it,
but being able to enter with your eye.
- [Steven] What you just said is very close
to the process that the artist uses.
Mayhew came out of the abstract expressionist tradition
of artists who were interested
not in representing the external world,
but rather to find a way of expressing an interior state.
And that might be through action painting
in canvases by artists like Jackson Pollock
or it might be a much quieter kind of canvas
such as we see in the work of Mark Rothko.
And the artist has said that his process
is to pour paint onto the canvas
and then to respond to what he sees slowly,
not to come to it with
a predetermined narrative or composition.
And I think that that's evident when we look at
the surface of this painting, which layers so many colors.
And it seems as if the paint is literally finding its way.
- [Shawnya] The bottom of the composition,
you can feel the buildup.
You have the lavenders and the purples and the greens,
and then you can move through to the blue,
and then to this open space with the orange.
So it's almost like you're traveling through a thicket
and then you open it up
and you see this broad landscape of orange and green.
- [Steven] When I step back from this painting,
those fields of color become fields of space
and they resolve as landscape.
But when I walk up close, I'm seeing the paint,
I'm seeing the surface, I'm seeing this
as much more two dimensional plane of color
and as more pure abstraction.
So this is really interesting tension
that the artist is able to achieve
between what seems like spontaneity,
but also informed, at the same time,
by the long tradition of landscape painting.
- [Shawnya] Everything from non-descript areas
that make you feel as though
it's that plein air painting styles
that are more sketchy in quality,
to the whole idea of the layering and profusion of paint
that you would see in abstract expressionism.
And then the hint of a more traditional landscape painting
in the background with the trees
where you get the sense of depth, of perspective.
- [Steven] And the painting seems to be referencing
French Baroque painting, the work of Claude,
the work of Poussin.
The idea of framing a landscape with trees on either side,
and also using a technique where we see recessionary planes
that lead our eye step by step
back into the depth of the canvas.
- [Shawnya] Mayhew would've also been informed
by changes that would've occurred in the 1960s.
Even when you look at the orange,
it's this acid quality of color,
or the juxtaposition of the colors
reminds us of the palette of some paintings in the 1960s.
- [Steven] So it's interesting to think about
what it means to produce paintings that are so beautiful
in a time of social turmoil in the 1960s.
The artist was a member of Spiral,
a group of artists who were interested in
discussing how art could have social agency.
- [Shawnya] This group of black artists in particular
were interested in how their work could be
part of a larger message of social activism.
Even though this painting was done in the nineties,
you get this sense of some of the tensions
within that group, but also around them during the 1960s
of wanting to both be individualistic,
but also to be part of a larger conversation
about blackness, about what that means,
about trespassing the conventional ways
of artistically creating.
Spiral was formed directly in response to
the March on Washington during the civil rights movement,
at a time where black artists in particular
were grappling with how they could lend their voice
toward the struggle for freedom and civil rights.
This tension of wanting to both embrace
a larger artistic heritage,
but to still be able to speak to personal issues,
in this case, indigenous spiritual space.
I look at these colors and I think about
how Mayhew evolved over time.
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