Recently, I sat down with Republic, Washington 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.
I have to have all those things working together. Everyone who gets into art seriously has their own style of working with those harmonies that are very individual. I’m always looking for that extra special thing that happens in my work.

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