Artists

Woodward Payne
American, B.1955

Artist’s statement “As my work has developed over the years, I find increasingly that I identify with, and respond to, the sensuality of nature and landscape in all aspects”.

Woodward Payne was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1935. He is a painter and photographer by profession. His paintings have been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the United States, and are included in distinguished private and public collections.

Following completion of undergraduate school at Arizona State University and graduate school at Indiana University he spent four years in Germany, during which period he traveled extensively throughout Europe. His paintings of this period were primarily landscapes and cityscapes, which were ultimately exhibited in one-man shows in Munich and Berlin.

In 1966, he returned to Arizona where he spent the next fifteen years teaching at Mesa Community College and Arizona State University. His work as an artist began to be influenced and, to a significant degree, shaped by his experiences as an aviator (he learned to fly when he was 13) as well as his love of travel. During the past fifty years he has taken thousands of slides and digital photographs of which many have served as idea sources for his paintings. His subject matter includes aerial landscapes, landscapes, dynamic florals, seascapes and abstracts.

Mr. Payne was highly honored by an award, in April 1986, of First Prize in Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum Earth Views competition in Washington D.C. The competition was open to artists throughout the United States, and over 2000 paintings were entered. One of these was selected for the First Prize purchase award, adding Woodward Payne’s aerial painting “Morning Mist” to the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution.

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