"Mayo is artist,whose humor is perhaps,a tad eccentric,in a good way.
Her composition is interestingly off center,while hidden elements creep up and surprise.
Beetles and bugs, and half human like heads bare their teeth.
Text is almost always included in her artworks, with words like “no mind games”,cluing in the viewer on the mood and tone of the piece.
Although the subject matter is at times despondent, i.e. half human, half-animal like creatures caught up in their own quagmires, the color and naive illustration style offers hope that perhaps, in the bigger picture, things are not as bleak as they may seem.
Mayo adores working with traditional tools such as the brush,pencil and paint, savoring her favorite moment when she thins down the watercolors on paper. She does almost everything by hand, including making her own vintage paper.
Finally though, she uses a Wacom pad for collaging and the finish.
Her favorite characters while she was young, were not cartoons, but live animals.
Spending time catching frogs,climbing trees to go get sweet cherries and playing with cats and dogs, were things she loved immensely. Mayo says that her childhood playmates had an intense influence on her, and is today, still visible in her art.
Mayo believes, that the tree major questions that we seek answers to in life,
Where do I come from?
Where am I?
Where am I going?, causes us to create masks.
For her, these masks are like the characters we create in order to express emotion.
Mayo goes on to say that, in her view, “rich” civilization has lost this need to find our true selves beneath the mask of “others” characters.
She says “ It is different in places where the world really isn't a fairy tale,where getting food is equally essential to breathing air.
In these places, fairy tale is still about the battle between good and evil,
in the CLEANEST FORM!”
It is perhaps this consciousness that informs her art, for we see the characters in sometimes lost, or overwhelmed in strange gardens and landscapes,seeking to emerge from the dark world of the chrysalis into the light."
Review from book "the garden of eye candy" by Bigbros Workshop & Basheer Graphic Books