FROM A PRIVATE SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA COLLECTION. EDGAR ALWIN PAYNE (American, 1883-1947). High in the Sierras. Oil on ca...

Description

FROM A PRIVATE SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA COLLECTION

EDGAR ALWIN PAYNE (American, 1883-1947)
High in the Sierras
Oil on canvas
34 x 34 inches (86.4 x 86.4 cm)
Signed lower right: Edgar Payne

The Sierra Nevada Mountains were to the California plein-air painter Edgar Alwin Payne what Mont Sainte-Victoire was to the French Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne: an evergreen source of subject matter and technical experimentation. Indeed, by the end of his career, Payne had become so associated with the Sierra Nevada, for years completing approximately one mountain painting per day and even producing a movie called "Sierra Journey," that "Payne Lake" at Humphrey's Basin was named after him. Payne left his hometown of Washburn, Missouri, at age fourteen and cut his teeth on the artist's trade by painting signs, murals and set designs in the Ozarks, Texas, and ultimately Chicago, where he trained for a brief two weeks at the Chicago Art Institute. A trip to the West Coast in 1909 exposed Payne for the first time to the majesty of the California landscape, from the hills of San Francisco to the high peaks of the Sierras to the shores of Laguna Beach, which soon became his home base. During the teens, Payne traveled and painted throughout the Southwest, under the auspices of the Santa Fe Railroad, and during the 1920s he and his wife, Elsie, lived in New York, but it was always California that fueled his artistic energy. In 1919 Payne founded the Laguna Beach Art Association and the Gallery of Laguna Beach, and by the early 1930s he had returned to Los Angeles, thereafter continuing his frequent trips to the Sierras.

High in the Sierras is "classic Payne," exemplifying his Post-Impressionist-inspired brushwork, palette, and composition. Like Cézanne in his Mont Sainte-Victoire series, Payne utilizes balanced, interlocking planes of color - here sage greens, dusty pinks, and grey-purples -- in order to build the mountain's density. At the same time, he almost flattens the mountain - recalling the aesthetic of his work as a muralist and set designer --, pushing it into the viewer's space in order to emphasize its massive power. In others of his Sierra Nevada scenes, particularly those featuring Indians on horseback, Payne accentuates plunging diagonal foregrounds that pull the viewer into the landscape. Here, however, the mountain dominates, anchored by a slim band of turquoise lake and shadowed woodland repoussoirs. Payne's 1941 treatise, "The Composition of Outdoor Painting," underscored the ideal effects achievable through serial painting: "A painter needs to study, meditate and experiment and practice interminably in order to produce a painting that would have nobility in its concept, variety, rhythm, repetition, unity, balance and harmony in its composition."


More information about EDGAR ALWIN PAYNE. See also: Payne, Edgar Alwin, Edgar Alwin Payne, Payne, Edgar Artist.

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