NYAB Event - Herb Alpert and Richard Mayhew “Harmonic Rhythms”

Herb Alpert and Richard Mayhew “Harmonic Rhythms”

ACA Galleries

This event has ended.

ACA Galleries presents Herb Alpert and Richard Mayhew: Harmonic Rhythms.

Primarily known for his music, Herb Alpert has gained a reputation as an accomplished visual artist. At 91, Richard Mayhew is acknowledged as one of America’s premier landscape painters and colorists. Both artists, informed intensely by music, use improvisation in their work.

Herb Alpert’s sculptures reveal Alpert’s growth and influences: the spirituality of the native American totems of the Pacific Northwest, the monumentality and modernism of Rodin, Henry Moore and Alberto Giacometti. But as these influences passed through Alpert, they picked up elements of Alpert’s soul, a soul informed by the harmonies and rhythms of music, especially jazz. Thus, his totemic forms are as effervescent as they are magisterial, as sensual as they are spiritual.
Alpert’s sculptures, though generally abstract, nonetheless revel in the fleshy exuberance of human forms.
Sensuality and sexuality proclaim themselves with eloquent poise. Alpert treats sensuality not just as an
organic experience, but as emotions that seem to erupt from the sculptures themselves. Thus, this interplay
between the emotional, physical and spiritual gives Alpert’s sculptures and internal power, an energy that
flows from their forms and surrounds the viewer.

Richard Mayhew expresses in color and landscape the spirituality Alpert finds in form. Mayhew’s oeuvre is
spirit itself, the spirit that inhabits Mayhew’s landscapes of the mind and soul. His African-American,
Cherokee and Shinnecock ancestry provide a deep well of spiritual heritage from which to draw on, and finds
expression in the near-mystical visions of nature Mayhew spreads across his canvases. Colors shimmer;
fields and hills undulate; trees quiver. Mayhew’s landscapes, pouring forth from the depths of his
imagination, inhabit their painted surface with equal measure of serenity and energy.
A jazz singer himself, rhythm and melody seem to flow through Mayhew’s landscapes: smoothly gliding
through one area, skipping in syncopation in another, colors rising like melodies through the air. Like much
of jazz, Mayhew’s work is often improvisational. As a painter, he’ll let the picture dictate its own creation,
letting the paint flow where it needs to flow, much as a jazz musician will let the notes fly where they need to
fly. Mayhew thus trusts the paint, the process of painting, and his deep knowledge of how it all works. He
understands that improvisation does not mean abandoning skill or control of one’s medium, but that skill and
chance must enhance each other.

Media

• Painting
• Sculpture

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