Yearly Archives: 2015

Discovering Phillip Payne of Santa Fe, New Mexico

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Phillip Payne: Visions of an Iron Horse

For a man in love with the Old West I astound myself sometimes with what I don’t know about it! I was completely unaware of ‘Western Art’ until, by happy accident, I was funnelled off Interstate 25 into the heart of New Mexico’s capital, Santa Fe, during a nine week, solo road trip across The West earlier this year. But for this, I would have driven past the World’s second largest art market after NYC and missed discovering this genre. As I intend to write more about it in Talking Beautiful Stuff, I will concentrate here on the man who introduced me to it.

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Phillip Payne at work on: Quanah Parker, the Battle of Blanco Canyon.

For two days I explored the downtown streets of this small, attractive, unusual and classy city lying in the heart of one of America’s most remote, arid and empty regions. Native American pottery and turquoise jewellery of the highest quality filled exquisite emporiums. Galleries by the hundred purveyed every kind of art imaginable and with this sophistication and wealth came comparable coffee houses, restaurants and gift shops. However, having this lifelong fascination for The Old West, I was drawn to the galleries that displayed bronzes and paintings of cowboys, Indians, buffalo and horses and awe-inspiring western landscapes. In one of these I met the gallery director Phillip Payne. His welcome to a road-weary scruff, who clearly couldn’t afford any of the wonders offered in his extremely classy gallery, was a delight that many gallery directors could take a lesson from. We fell into good conversation. At this point I had no idea who I was talking to. I soon discovered that Phillip is also a sculptor, creating powerful bronzes of many subjects including those with a ‘western’ theme. As an extra attraction to the gallery for browsing visitors, he works on an on-going piece using an oily clay.

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Phillip Payne: Beethoven: Feeling the Music

He showed me his bronze: “Beethoven: Feeling the Music.” He read out the words of Beethoven engraved into the piano lid: “Had I not read somewhere that a man should not quit this life so long as he can still perform a good deed, I would have left this Earth long ago and by my own hand at that. I can’t imagine leaving this World without taking the art God has placed in my soul and putting it to pen for others to hear.” This clearly echoed his own feelings as I saw him gulp with emotion. Here was a man who appeared profoundly involved with his creations and it was at this point that I decided that the readers of Talking Beautiful Stuff should know of him. I was privileged to be allowed an interview. In the half hour or so that we talked we both found ourselves close to tears as we discussed the influence of our deceased fathers upon us. It was a moving experience for me. I found Phillip to be completely without pretension and very sincere about the reason for and the philosophy surrounding his creative talent.

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Phillip Payne: Breaking Camp

If you visit Phillip’s website you are greeted with his words: ‘To create art is to bare your soul in the hopes that you will find a kindred spirit in the hearts of others’. This declaration is close to his answer to my question, “Why do you create?” He told me something along the lines of his desire to share with others the things that move him and better his life but unfortunately, over my travels, I lost my notes of our interview where I recorded his words verbatim. However, I well remember how unusually selfless his personal philosophy was and also my scepticism about this as it doesn’t fit with my ideas about creative people! By the end of the interview though, I was convinced that here was an extremely rare being – a truly altruistic artist.

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Phillip Payne: Canyon Sanctuary

I was now aware that Phillip’s father was Ken Payne, sadly deceased, but not yet aware of Ken’s stature in America as a sculptor. Phillip spoke fondly, with some emotion, of his tutelage under the kind and patient eye of his father and showed me his influence upon him as a sculptor. Phillip likes to create moments from western history that have importance to him and to bring awareness to others of the greatness of some of the leaders in the Native American struggle against white Manifest Destiny such as Quanah Parker of the Comanche Nation.

Having said farewell to Phillip I visited other galleries and discovered that I had fallen upon the mother lode of creators in bronze, a veritable ‘ant nest’ of brilliance. Ken Payne, his sons Vic and Phillip Payne and Vic’s son Dustin are all celebrated and tremendous sculptors within the genre of what I now recognised as ‘Western Art’. Vic’s daughter Jordyn is a painter of the most vibrant and gorgeous, western  landscapes. What a family! The artistic gene proves its existence!

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Phillip Payne: If it ain’t got that swing

As I journeyed on I saw many ‘Paynes’ creating wonderful moments as they graced the streets, parks, museums and galleries of The West’s towns and cities. I confess to relishing the change in attitude displayed by ‘Western Art’ gallery directors when I mentioned that I had interviewed Phillip Payne! The Payne family commands enormous respect in America.

Phillip Payne is a very young man and is already an accomplished and acclaimed sculptor. I believe that he has a glittering career ahead of him that can only blossom when fuelled by such a kind and unselfish philosophy towards his creative nature.

Ai WeiWei says “Think Different”

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OpenArt in Örebro, Sweden is the 2008 brainchild of locals Mats Nilsson and Lars Jonsson. They dreamed of cutting-edge “art” on display in public loca­tions. And guess what? Their dream came true…. and rapidly. Now in 2015, it is the biggest such event in Scandinavia. This year includes a focus on Chinese artists so no surprise that it features a major work by Ai Weiwei. It blows in the wind and blows me away!!

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Ai WeiWei is known for confronting – and being arrested by – Chinese authorities. He questions everything about the culture of imposed conformity of his own country. This work, “Think different (How to hang workers’ uniforms)” consists of 375 coveralls in six different colours hung well above head height along Köpmangatan, an Örebro street. These are workers’ uniforms used in China in the massive electronics and computing manufacturing industries. The coveralls flap and flicker in the wind casting disconcerting shadows on the street below. Western people stroll beneath. I wonder if they are thinking differently.

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So who is Ai WeiWei telling to think differently? Is it me, the Western viewer? Is it Chinese people? Is it the Chinese authorities? In fact, thinking about it, “Think Differently (How to hang workers’ uniforms)” does make me think differently. Here are some questions that run through my head when I look up at these rows of coveralls. I am reminded of assembly lines. How many Chinese people work to make products destined for the western world? Are they paid well? Are they aware of workers’ rights? What are they interested in? What are their home lives like? Or is Ai WeiWei telling me that the real price of western consumerism is paid by Chinese workers? This work is brilliant and provocative. I’m pleased I went back to Örebro!

#alyaakamel

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I open my Facebook homepage. I see a bundle of red wool pulled into a heart shape. Amid the thousands of photos that I come across each day via the internet, this stands out. It has a simple and naïve charm. It is posted by Alyaa Kamel, the queen of that corner of cyberspace where “art” and social media blur into one. The text of the post reads: #Iloveme #love #heart #loveisnow #lovingmyself #process #evolution #respect #act #say #talk #think #arttherapy #life #world #humanity #contemporaryart #design #myart #wool #paper #alyaakamel (Interesting!)

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I head into Geneva’s old town and visit this striking and versatile painter in her studio. I am immediately captivated by an inky dervish-like figure, beautifully proportioned, poised and slightly stooped as if resting between manic whirls. However, my objective today is neither to admire nor to buy. I am after a behind-the-scenes-and-screens glimpse of Alyaa’s virtual gallery. We chat. I ask her about her unrelenting Facebook activity that could stretch to ten posts per day. She’s a little elusive. She says it’s about promoting and selling her work. I am not totally convinced. It is the “why” of so much activity that fascinates and that I really want to explore. There must be other incentives and impulses at play. I struggle to pitch the right question.

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Of all the images that Alyaa posts, her people fascinate the most. Who they are is unclear. They are frequently hooded or veiled. They are oppressed people; people in ruins; displaced people; poor people; crowded people; and people in distress. They are, in brief, a kind of faceless generic for those people about whom every day world news is made. She just feels for people caught up in events over which they have no control and she pours it all out on Facebook.

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Alyaa travels far and wide often in the company of Martin La Roche. Their clothes, their parties, their dinners and hotel rooms are all posted on their profile pages. Amid all this, she also executes and posts exquisite little sketches. Leafing through her (paper) sketchbook is a pleasure and a privilege. Take a look at this hotel in Stockholm!

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The most intriguing theme that Alyaa Kamel posts by the day – and the most revealing – is Little Alyaa. This pre-adolescent feminine persona expresses any and every little girl thought or emotion that might flit through the mind of an adult in a moment of regression. A cloth version travels in Alyaa’s handbag and does cameo photo-calls wherever her creater takes her. Little Alyaa rattles my sense of macho. I feel manipulated and irritated by her. I wish I could say I had absolutely no interest in her o-so-cute-girlie-on-valentine-card-addressed-to-self sentiments. But I can’t resist the pull of her charm, the more so with following her on Facebook. I come to realise that Little Alyaa is a very articulate little miss. She is brilliantly characterised and presented. She has, inevitably, a huge, and not entirely female, following. Just as Alyaa Kamel’s people speak of world events, Little Alyaa speaks to Big Alyaa’s friends and admirers. And just to tighten the saccharine screws, Little Alyaa sometimes shares a Facebook post with a teddy bear. The text is more revealing still….. ‪#‎givemebackmylife‬ ‪#‎life‬ ‪#‎teddyismine‬ ‪#‎teddybear‬ ‪#‎IamwhoIam‬ ‪#‎identity‬ ‪#‎innocence‬ ‪#‎childhood‬ ‪#‎mylife‬ ‪#‎live‬ ‪#‎alive‬ ‪#‎art‬ ‪#‎alyaakamel‬ ‪#‎contemporaryart‬ ‪#‎design‬ ‪#‎decoration‬ ‪#‎illustration‬ ‪#‎drawing‬ ‪#‎fineart‬

I admire Alyaa’s eclectic work and enjoy her unrelenting use of Facebook. However, her hashtag word clouds represent much more than a strategy of promotion and sales. They serve to bare her soul and simultaneously act as gaping virtual look-at-me dragnets that communicate with and capture a wide variety of other emotional and creative fish. But the question of “why” remains. A generous answer is that this behaviour signals a talented painter of the twenty-first century using social media unashamedly to promote her work by expressing her fears, hopes, longings and aspirations to as wide an audience as possible. A less generous answer is that she has a compulsion to put herself “out there” on social media. Perhaps the real answer lies somewhere in between. My attempt at analysis of Alyaa Kamel’s Facebook activity stops here. I just love it. #hugrobin #robinneedsabeer