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Recently, I sat down with Republic artist and photographer, Charlene Payton
to talk about her photography.
GG: What possessed you to pick up the camera? CP: I had to teach photography where I was teaching art. So I took a photography course at the community college. I kept taking courses and fell in love with it. Before I knew it, I was doing a lot of photography. GG: Where was that? CP: Sherman Indian High School in Riverside, California. It’s an off-reservation boarding school, which had students west of the Missouri from the reservations. Mostly from the Grand Canyon, Arizona, and southwest area. We had children from as far north as Alaska, and from as far south as Mexico. GG: What kinds of pictures did you take when you started? CP: I followed the course descriptions, but there was one particular man who was extremely creative. That was Bill Kinder, and he was an artist, not just a photographer. He exposed us to all kinds of possibilities! (No pun intended!). Collage, painting with chemistry. Everything was in the darkroom, and still is for me. I like the process. I love building up layers with color. There’s a lot of the accidental that comes into play for me. GG: Let’s talk about the series you’re displaying at the CAF gallery. What was your inspiration? CP: My inspiration was mainly my students at Sherman. I taught art for grades nine through twelve for three years. I had my advanced kids in photography. Working with Indian children, knowing their history and their different cultures, the fact that art for them is "medicine". In the native vernacular, there is no such word for "art". GG: It’s a different mindset from mainstream American culture. Can you expand on the idea of ‘art as medicine’? CP: Well, because there’s power in it. There’s power to heal. When you talk about sand painting with the Navajo, when they get done with their sand painting, they disperse it. Because the healing has been done, the art was the healing. The process is everything. Just laying down the sand and the colors and shapes that they’ve formed. They don’t know what they’re going to do before they start and as they reveal the all the different images and symbols, those symbols are from the spirits that heal you. So art is always something revered and very special to the kids. GG: In the cultures that you’re talking about, the Native American cultures, if there’s no such word as "art", then I’m assuming there is no such word as "artist"? CP: That’s right. It’s "medicine person" and not everyone can do the "medicine". GG: Like a lot of artists, it sounds like your work is a discovery process. CP: Yes, I think I’m going back to my roots in some ways; my great-grandmother was a Wampanoag Indian. I’m delving more into the spirit side of things. GG: Do you consider your photography like the Native American cultures "medicine" or healing for yourself? CP: Yes. It’s a healing process. It offers the viewer that same kind of healing. It should challenge the person who looks at it. It should take them out of the realm of the mundane and take them into something more powerful. Maybe they can rise above whatever it is that they’re dealing with that day. GG: How did you happen to live in Spain? CP: I had an opportunity to study in Spain with a friend of the family who was returning to Spain. At the time, I was attending Kent State on a full art scholarship. I thought going to Spain would be a great experience. She had an art gallery in Barcelona before the Spanish civil war. She introduced me to an incredible man whose name was Salvador Aulestia. He was a painter and sculptor. I went to study in his home. He had one piece in the port of Barcelona, "El Sideroploide". It’s a Sanskrit word that has to do with the evolution of the soul. It was a sculpture that was 150 feet long and 20 feet high in one place. It was homage to those who died at sea. It also had to do with the evolution of the consciousness. The man was a genius and spoke seven languages, one of which was Chinese. Sanskrit is not a spoken language, but he knew Sanskrit; he had studied in Egypt. GG: So this was a watershed event in your life? CP: Yes, he was a major influence in my life. He introduced me to the idea of abstraction. Something that is representational is not necessarily high art. In other words, a truly representational piece has all the abstraction within the piece, from one stroke to the next; you’ll have the harmony of abstract elements. For instance, if you look at a Velasquez painting, his paintings are huge, if you looked in one area, like in a lower left-hand corner, a part of the dress of the person he was painting, you would see total abstraction in that part of the dress. You’d have to be so connected in the way you used the paint. The elements have to be working together at the most miniscule level. So from paint stroke to paint stroke, you have to have that harmony there, as well as the overall macrocosm of the painting. He taught me about the very dynamic of the life force, going from one stroke to the next. How present are you? Are you just "scrubbing the surface", or are you truly present with that moment? GG: That’s a very good point. You’re saying that the life force is evident and you can see it. CP: Absolutely. So when I do my work, I’m looking for those elements all the
time. Whether it’s photography, intaglio, drawing, it doesn’t matter what I’m
doing, it has to have that power.
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Artist's Statement The human form has fascinated me all my life. From my beginnings as an artist I worked to perfect my ability to draw and paint the figure. As a young adult, I danced and movement became a passion. Through dance I became even more sensitized to the concept of movement as it relates to visual forms. All my drawing, whether it is nonobjective or representational, reveals my love of movement. In my current series of drawings and paintings, I have returned to life studies of the figure. Some pieces are complete for their gesture alone, or the economy of line. My intent was also to consider the individuality of the model or to emphasis the sensuality of the body’s shape or line. These sketches in conte crayon and paint are complete in themselves, although they are also a step in the process of another oeuvre I am working on that involves the figure in relation to landscape. It has always been my excitement as a visual artist to experience my materials and subjects as a dynamic process. There is an involvement that allows for unexpected results that unsettle our standard perceptions. Photography became an art experience in the darkroom when I manipulated light to alter the conventional image. Then, there is the drawn or painted subject and here again, I seek to play with the materials so that the subject, even if it is realistic, is dictated by the abstraction within the stroke of the conte crayon, or the demand for a color that is not traditional. Shapes take on a life of their own but can still render the form in a representational way. It is a communication that takes the subject and the realism into account but is dependent on the elements of line, shape and color, for example, to have their voices. One stroke speaks and the next must answer. This is the microcosmic aspect. The subject becomes charged with the harmonies within the structure and the expression of those harmonies makes the subject come alive. Paul Klee talked about the line as a dot rising out of infinity, emerging into existence and depending on its dynamic, having a certain type of energy, moving in space and exiting back into infinity again. I share this aesthetic from the experience I have as an artist, whatever media I am using. Charlene Payton Holt July, 2006
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Charlene at her "Eagle Ridge Studio", Republic, WA 2006
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Charlene Payton Holt resides in Republic, WA. She established "Eagle Ridge Art Studio" in June, 2006 along with participation in NCAT. Nestled in the San Poil Valley, she has Mount Gibraltar at the end of her road and has a focus on the various mountains in Ferry County for her most recent images. She has been working from the figure for two years and has found a venue with the nature that surrounds her home and the human form. Charlene's career includes a BFA in Studio Art from Kent State University in 1972. She was also a student at the Cleveland Institute of Art for her sophomore and junior years in Cleveland, OH. In 1966 she spent six months studying at the atelier of Salvador Aulestia in Barcelona, Spain. For Charlene, this was the turning point to choosing art as her life long career. She was enamored of the Spanish culture in her teen years, studying Spanish and flamenco dance, a passion that has never left her and which has influenced much of her art. Dance in all its forms and the human figure in movement have been a theme throughout Charlene's work. Then, the calligraphic line and movement as it is expressed in line is another aspect of her images. If she is working from the model, then her lines seem to dance across the surface. In recent years, Charlene added this approach to her darkroom images, "painting" with the chemistry to create altered images that definitely emphasize line and almost a Jackson Pollock abandon. Her studio in Republic has many framed and available photographs for viewing and purchase. It is not surprising, with her attitude for beautiful line, that Charlene became interested in calligraphy and the various book arts during her career. She is proficient in twenty-two scripts using the broad pen, Turkish paper marbling and book binding. She has expressed the thought of using word images with her figures as well. If you travel to Republic, the historical mural of Ranald MacDonald's life, an 8' x 12' triptych on Kettle River Rd. 10 mi. North of Hwy 21 in Curlew, you'll see her painting in a traditional style along with complete text describing the adventurer's life done in Humanist or Round hand script. Charlene moved to Washington state in 1999, having lived in Southern California since 1990. The move West brought her to her Indian heritage and Wampanoag ancestry. This became a move toward Native American imagery and a job teaching art at Sherman Indian High School, an off reservation boarding school in Riverside, CA. Charlene taught there from 1996 to 1999. She now works fulltime as an artist, having left the teaching profession, except for occasional workshops. Charlene has a printmaking studio in the back porch area of her home at 5 Five Cent Ranch Rd. where she is producing prints on her Graphic Chemical printing press, intaglio woodcuts and photo etched images. She has a greenhouse area for painting in moderate weather conditions and has figure drawing sessions as well. Lastly, she has additional areas of her home that house her framed art and accommodate drawing board work. Look for Charlene’s studio. It is No. 14 on the NCAT tour brochure. Call for an appointment at 509.775.0982 or visit her during open studio hours: Friday and Saturdays: noon-6pm. June 15-September 30, 2006.
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