Throughout Richard Mayhew's life, he draws from his own the depths of human experience. He is descended from a multi-cultural background, growing up with a blend of African-American and Native-American Cherokee-Lumbee and Shinnecock customs and traditions. The stories of his ancestors he learned as a boy are alive in him as he paints.

Over his long painting career, he has studied and/or taught at Pennsylvania State University, the Brooklyn Museum Art School, the Pratt Institute, Smith College, Hunter College, California State University East Bay, San Jose State University, Sonoma State University and UC Santa Cruz.

Both as a student and as a teacher, Richard has always practiced an interdisciplinary approach to his art. As a young man in New York, he was a jazz singer performing in New York clubs, even venturing out from time to time to the "Borscht Belt" in the Catskill Mountains. His approach to painting retains the basic jazz element of improvisation along with his extraordinary color sense. Like a jazz composition, Richard Mayhew's improvised colors have a harmony and rhythm that can be both jarring and pleasing at the same time, with both harmony and dissonance, a delight, something we've not seen before.

Today, Richard Mayhew's paintings are in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the de Young Museum of San Francisco, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C.

There's a lot to be learned from Professor Mayhew for painters of all kinds of genres and styles. It was a delight to see his work in person and to learn of his thoughts regarding the connections between color and emotion, of how paintings can reverberate deeper meanings, feelings and passion.

Although this exhibition is small by large museum standards, I left the exhibition feeling I had seen something uplifting and significant, something I wanted to share with others. It is well worth your time to visit the Sonoma Valley Museum. Time is short. The exhibition runs through January 7.

Napoleon Primo Vallejo was born in 1850 when California became a state and young Napoleon grew up with the state. As a teenager, he read stories of the War Between the States happening back East. He would have been 15 yers old when news of Abraham Lincoln's assassination reached California. As a young man, he saw the opening of the transcontinental railroad and California's meteoric expansion as people poured in and California grew. When he was 56 years old, he witnessed the horror of San Francisco's Earthquake and fire in 1906 and the resurrection of modern San Francisco.

Napoleon was the youngest son of Benicia and General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo. He was born in "La Casa Grande" (destroyed by fire except for the servants quarters in 1867) just steps away from the Sonoma Mission. He grew up in "Lachryma Montis," the Vallejo family home in Sonoma. When Napoleon was 15, his father built a small cottage out back which came to be known as "Napoleon's Cottage." The cottage still stands today. Napoleon had a passion for the outdoors and painting. His paintings were both landscapes and seascapes. In his later years, he was a writer and journalist, documenting his family's history. Some of his writings were published in the San Francisco Chronicle in the early 1920's. Napoleon died in 1923 at the age of 73.

Both Joshua Meador's Captain Vallejo's Casa, and Napoleon Primo Vallejo's Crashing Waves are available for sale. For interested persons or groups, we would be pleased to arrange for a showing of either or both paintings in Sonoma. Email, call or text us, 707-875-2911 / Art@BodegaBayHeritageGallery.com.

Jim Callahan, the statue’s sculptor, said the sitting position is part of a genre of similar works around the world of other great figures ranging from Gandhi, to Mark Twain, Winston Churchill and Albert Einstein. Here's a LINK to Clark Mason's Press Democrat article.

Bentonville, AR
Crystal Bridges
Museum of American Art

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