VERSO
Titled
Label, Josh Hardy Galleries, Carmel, California

Art historian Rena Neumann Coen wrote, “In his [Payne’s] Southwestern paintings, as in all his work, the theme of the relationship between man and nature is an important one. Pirates and fishermen, packers and Navajo on horseback all move within a landscape to which they are closely related, both artistically and conceptually. In some works the conception seems romantic, but in others a profound philosophical and spiritual awareness is clearly conveyed. That his concern and respect for the natural world was neither unconscious nor automatically reflected we know from his writing. Very often it is in the desert paintings that this relationship is most clearly expressed, with Indian horsemen often shown as very small figures within a dominating landscape.

“Edgar instinctively recognized the elemental human need for an organizing rhythm in pictorial composition and he compared its function in painting to music and dance. ‘As the dancer uses rhythm to integrate time, space and movement,’ he observed, ‘so too does the painter utilize this element to integrate the factors in art.’ … Above all, in the Southwest as elsewhere, the artist must be in tune with nature, for ‘to feel the spirt of nature is to feel the rhythmic, spiritual flow which encircles animate and inanimate nature – the rhythm of life and the universe.’”

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