It’s easy to find yourself in a rut. Or maybe it just feels like something else that’s close to doing the same thing too much. Maybe that’s the same thing as a rut…

Anyways, I’ve probably been too reductive in palette, and probably been like that for way too long. Generally, I feel that if you don’t watch out you get entranced by the ability to slap endless amounts of color on works and then you get mess. It gets worse when you try and do that AND try and blend it all together. Then you get brown. Brown is rarely the expression you’d desire. Therefore, you constrain color to highly selective small sets.

And then, as if the Gods had interfered (but probably haven’t), this Richard Mayhew retrospective popped up. I bought it.

I decided to try to get close to how Mayhew paints, as seen in the book. Seems like an excellent exercise to try and broaden my skills at color. I’ve done a few paintings with this as the goal. I am excited to continue on with a few more.

Doing the paltry amount of reading an artist would do – or what I have seen me and my other artist friends do, I’ve learned that Mayhew is also a jazz musician.

After messing around a little bit with jazz chords on guitar and listening more and more to jazz music, the color choices and execution seems to make a lot more sense to me when I look at the work. This drives me to trail a bit more in Mayhew’s wake. I think there’s a lot more to learn.

I’ll share a few of my paintings later on, but if you have the opportunity, I think you should pick up Richard Mayhew – Transcendence. It’s stupid cheap for what you get. That’s right now, eventually we all know these books tend to rise to stupid expensive levels.