Bio
Barbara Mayfield works in oil and acrylic on canvas, panel and paper, and monotype. She studied at Tyler School of Art and is a graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Mayfield has enjoyed a long professional career in the visual arts as a painter, printmaker, theatrical set designer, and muralist. Born and raised in Philadelphia, she is a graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Certificate Program. Upon graduation, she was awarded a J. Henry Schiedt Memorial Travel Scholarship and spent 10 weeks traveling through Europe and Mexico.
As one of four artists on the first mural arts team at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Community Programs Department, Mayfield worked with Clarence Wood and Don Kaiser, the dynamos who brought contemporary mural art to Philadelphia in the late 1970’s.
Philly born and raised, Mayfield lived for 21 years in northern New Mexico where she studied monotype printmaking with Garner Tullis, Richard Tullis and Larry Bell at the Santa Fe Art Institute. Her work has been represented by fine galleries in Philadelphia PA., Washington DC, Stamford CT, and Santa Fe, NM. Her paintings and monotypes are part of both public and private collections across the country.
In 2015, Mayfield launched her color consultancy, working with a wide variety of professional and residential clients choosing paint colors for their homes and workplaces. Mayfield has created personal color palettes for more than 850 interiors and exteriors, working on-site and over the Zoom platform. Visit ChoosingPaintColor.com for more information.
She currently makes her home in Narberth, just 8 miles from the Liberty Bell. Her studio is in the Norristown Arts Building in Norristown, PA.
Statement
I am inspired by the bone-crushing beauty of life —-sky, land, the watery places, and creatures that fly. I tend to work in series, sometimes completed in a few weeks, sometimes over years: At the Edge of the World, In the Beginning, La Selba, Wall Stories, Cracked Open, Witches-Queens-Selkies-Souls, Land of Enchantment, Deep Water, Gardens and Meadows, The Eastern Woods.
No matter what I’m working in — oil, monotype, assemblage or acrylic— the process always involves applying layers and layers of color, opaque and translucent, building up the surface with texture and stroke, recording the marks/scars that happen to everything and everyone as we walk through our time in the physical world. Recent work is inspired by the great immensity we inhabit and our minuscule, exquisite place in it.
