Susan Mayfield is an artist well known for her use of color and light in her pastel and oil landscapes. A native of Charleston, SC, she and her husband, Lee Hunnicutt, currently divide their time between the Lowcountry of South Carolina, and Salida, Colorado, finding inspiration in the natural beauty of both environments.
After graduating with honors in Fine Arts from the College of Charleston, in South Carolina, Mayfield continued her studies with many prominent contemporary artists. Her career has included solo and group exhibits in galleries such as the Wells Gallery, in Charleston, SC, the Joyce Robins Gallery in Santa Fe, NM, The Red Piano Gallery in Hilton Head, SC, the Gibbes Museum of Art, among many others. Her work is found in corporate and private collections, and her paintings have been exhibited internationally in the Art in the Embassies program. In addition to creating artwork, she teaches pastel and landscape painting workshops around the country, and ongoing classes in Salida and Charleston.
Mayfield takes frequent painting excursions to places that provide her inspiration, such as the high mountain deserts of New Mexico, the clear springs and cypress swamps of Florida, and recently to Thailand and Vietnam. Her work has focused on life near the water, from the sea islands of Georgia to the cypress swamps and black water creeks of her native South Carolina, to the white-water rivers of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Mayfield has explored the wetlands and the people who live there through paint and pastel. She has felt a sense of purpose to record and depict the way of life that exists on the rivers, creeks, and ocean; a way of life that has disappeared at a furious pace through development and natural causes.
She shows the same sensibility in her recent paintings from her new Colorado surroundings. The back alleys of Salida, the dramatic seasonal changes, the monumental beauty of the mountains against the big Colorado sky, provide constant inspiration to this artist. The dynamic, ever-changing Arkansas River is of particular interest as subject matter, from the raging early summer whitewater to the quiet flow through snow-covered banks in the winter.
