Paintings Department: Consolidation, stabilization, and restretching
Associate Paintings Conservator Kelsey during treatment of West, 1980, by Richard Mayhew.
Richard Mayhew (1924-2024) was a celebrated contemporary painter. His abstract landscapes, which he called “mindscapes,” evoke inner states of emotion through the exploration of color, diffused forms, and atmospheric space, and are grounded in his Native and African American heritage. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Mayhew studied art in New York City, and in 1963 during the Civil Rights Movement, he participated in Spiral, an influential collective of African American artists that worked to challenge the wider art community who excluded them from exhibition opportunities. His participation in Spiral solidified his commitment to exploring abstraction and landscape painting through his lived experience. Mayhew lived and worked in the Bay Area, with major exhibitions at SFMOMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, and the Smithsonian, until his death at the age of 100 earlier this fall. We are honored to contribute to preserving his legacy.
West, 1980, by Richard Mayhew is an abstracted landscape in vivid tones of pink, purple, and blue. It was delivered to the studio with several other paintings, including another untitled landscape from 1980, which had been previously unstretched and stored rolled for several decades in Mayhew’s studio. All the rolled paintings in the bundle had several areas where the top paint layer had delaminated from a glossy underlayer, causing the paint film to be unstable and incur losses. Treatment began with consolidant testing, followed by applying Aquazol between the top two paint layers with a brush before setting with a heated spatula to consolidate the delaminating, lifting paint. Once the paint film was stabilized, the painting was re-tensioned onto a custom, basswood stretcher. The painting could then be surface cleaned, losses filled, and finally cosmetically integrated, and inpainted.
Richard Mayhew, West, 1980 before and after treatment.
Detail of before and after treatment of delaminating paint layers on Untitled, 1980.
Associate Paintings Conservator Kelsey finishing restretching the canvas onto new stretcher bars.