Q & A with Sandra Payne, Artist

by Odili Donald Odita

Sandra Payne "From My Home," 1997 Mixed Media

1. What developments in your career as an artist led you to the work you are doing now?

An extreme hunger to examine beauty at its most outsized.

2. Can you describe some of the varying sources that feed your work?

Fifty Sources:
1. The scent of Casa Blanca Lillies.
2. As a child of the 1950's realizing that Josephine Baker could exist.
3. Knowing that nobody better tell Aretha Franklin that she was busting out of those too small outfits.
4. The dizzy interiors of Piranesi.
5. Colette read at dawn and dusk.
6. The Waterlillies of you know who.
7. Sweet potato pie from the kitchen of Aunt Berniece.
8. Aunt Ethel's couture hands running a business out of her kitchen.
9. The astringent intelligence of art not necessarily made for the eye.
10. Desert skies, desert smells.
11. A massage following a mineral bath.
12. The face and soul of diamonds.
13. A pearl's heart.
14. Nina Simone....Cesaria Evora...
15. Patti Labelle's 'Over the Rainbow.'
16. Flying to anywhere into the sun.
17. Wine tasting of roses.
18. A love affair imagined.
19. True love.
20. The drive from Santa Fe to Taos and then on to Ojo Caliente...alone.
21. The thrill of discovering Harryette Mullen, J. California Cooper, Julie Patton, so varied, so singular.
22. The discipline of arranging flowers.
23. Velvet, satin, chiffon...fur.
24. A cool glass of water filled with ice.
25. Memories of singular artworks.
26. Cut crystal and burning candles.
27. The grace of those who carry baskets, bundles and burdens on their heads.
28. Listening to Bobby Short and Ella Fitzgerald in a house trailer parked in a grapefruit grove.
29. Sequined devotional flags of Haiti.
30. Atget's photographs of Paris.
31. Butterfly wings.
32. Persian manuscripts.
33. Gilded Japanese screens.
34. Navajo Weavings.
35. The St. Louis Evening Whirl, a black tabloid of be-bop and jazz language speaking gospel.
36. The sacrifices of those who came before me.
37. The color red.
38. Strawberry ice cream.
39. Vanilla ice cream.
40. Aunt Verna's hot rolls.
41. Miz Edwards' fried chicken (fried amidst the Wheat Street roaches).
42. Perfumed by Joy.
43. Moroccan Jasmine.
44. The sunsets I witness.
45. The night sky away from city light.
46. Christmas trees.
47. A Chambered Nautilus.
48. Simplicity.
49. Peace.
50. Home.

3. At one time you spoke of the idea of shopping in a market? How does this feed into the aspect of viewing/seeing your current artwork?

A market is a concept, like a painting, a great work of literature, or a stunning handsome man allowing one to contemplate beauty, truth, desire, rage, jealousy, envy, contempt, and perhaps, the power of evil.

4. Can you explain in your words what you feel the glass and jewelry pieces mean, and what you are trying to evoke in the new work?

Velvet, glass, jewels, shells, copper wire, feathers, powdered pigment, driftwood, suede mean...nothing. These elements are in a conspiracy to seduce, to mystify, to pull as does an undertow.

5. Do you feel that you can place your work within the western tradition of art making? Does your work consider this, does it lie outside of this reality, or is it in a comfortable (uncomfortable?) place in between?

There remains an eternal need to create the unique, the never seen, never desired. That is the universal, global, feminine, masculine.

6. Where do you want your work to ultimately take you and your audience?

Take a walk with me in my underwater garden on the outer rings of Saturn.