"E Blue" Painting

Ealy Mays (born January 15, 1959) is a Paris-based American contemporary painter whose work operates at the intersection of history, identity, and social critique. Working in a bold, chromatic signature style with a satirical edge, Mays transforms cultural memory into urgent visual commentary — examining race, power, and the enduring complexity of the Black experience in the Western world.
As a Black American living in Paris, he is in constant dialogue with two worlds. France gave him distance — the particular clarity that comes from looking at one’s own country from the outside — and a mirror: the long tradition of Black American artists who came to this same city seeking creative freedom. That inheritance is both a comfort and a responsibility. His work Chocolate Ex-Pats (oil on canvas) entered the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. in 2024, as a gift of collectors Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson.
His paintings are social documents. They record the absurdities and violences of our time, dressed sometimes in bright colour and ironic form — because that is how people have always survived what would otherwise be unbearable. The image that looks celebratory may be mourning. The figure that appears triumphant may be cornered.
He cites Jacob Lawrence, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, Rufino Tamayo, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Maxfield Parrish, Herbert Gentry, and Edward Clark as central influences — a constellation reflecting the dual currents of his work: the Afro-American figurative tradition and the gestural force of Abstract Expressionism.
He lives and works in Paris, France.