About the Artists:
Susan Mayfield is an award-winning artist known for her use of color and light in
her pastel and oils. She was raised in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, a watery
landscape dominated by rivers, creeks and marshes, where she lived until
moving to Salida, Colorado, 8 years ago. Mayfield now divides her time between
the high mountain desert and the big open skies of Colorado, and the semitropical
coastline of South Carolina, and finds inspiration in the dynamic contrasts
between these two places.
After graduating with honors and receiving the Outstanding Fine Arts Student
Award from the College of Charleston, Mayfield continued her studies with
prominent artists from around the country. Her career has included solo and
group exhibits in galleries such as the Wells Gallery and the Gibbes Museum in
Charleston, SC, the Joyce Robins Gallery in Santa Fe, NM, The Red Piano
Gallery in Hilton Head, City Art Gallery in Greenville, NC, among many others.
Her paintings have been chosen for the Art in Embassies Program, and her work
is included in many corporate and private collections. She, along with artist
Stephen Smalzel, opened up the Smalzel Mayfield Art Gallery in 2012 in Salida,
Colorado. In 2015 she won the Best In Show award at the South Park Plein Air
Festival, and she continues to participate in plein air events around the country.
In addition to her painting, she teaches ongoing art classes and workshops in
Colorado and South Carolina.
Mayfield explores and interprets the landscape, in her travels and wherever she
finds herself residing. Her work has focused on the incredible wild places in and
around the canyon country of the Southwest with particular emphasis on the
rivers that carved them. Mayfield is inspired by her time spent hiking, camping,
painting plein air, and roaming around in Colorado and throughout the
Southwest. She served as a board member of the Friends of Browns Canyon
during the time Browns Canyon was designated as a National Monument, and is
an active proponent and avid fan of public lands. Susan’s partner in life is her
husband, Lee Hunnicutt, with whom she lives and travels with in search of art
and the next adventure.
Living 2000 miles from the Lowcountry has given Mayfield a new appreciation for
the landscape of her native state, with its abundance of marshes, barrier islands,
rivers heavy with atmosphere. Her most recent paintings are inspired by these
evocative places. She hopes to bring awareness to the need to protect the wild
places in her native state, so that future generations will be able to draw
inspiration from them as she does now.
|