Catch WVU grad student Payton Brown at Arts Walk while you can still afford her.
Last fall, Payton Brown was going to display some of her art at the Apple Butter Festival in Berkeley Springs, in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle. She grew up there not all that long ago—she just finished her undergraduate degree at WVU last May, and she’s in her first year now as a master’s student.
The festival was canceled because of COVID, leaving the street fair display structure Brown had planned unused. So when she heard about the downtown Morgantown Arts Walk, she decided to dust it off.
Brown is almost unfairly talented. She didn’t even start out in art until her junior year of high school—she was an athlete and a piano player as a young kid, then focused on the sciences, with an eye toward dental school. But after one AP art class, she never looked back. She focused on drawing for a few years, mainly pencil, then started painting with acrylics at WVU. Then, a class where she had to use oils gave her new focus.
“I was really intimidated—oil paint is what the old masters used in Renaissance paintings,” she says. “Then I tried it, and I have not used anything else since.” Oils give her the vibrant colors she loves, for one thing. “I like to use a lot of blending techniques, too, and, because oil paint dries so much slower, it lets me get the effects I want.”
So far, Brown has mainly painted subjects like food and streetscapes, interested in capturing the beauty in everyday things. But graduate school is about experimentation, she says. “So, before, everything I painted was super realistic and sharp and clean, and now I’m doing some small studies in a more brushy style. I’ve also done random abstract things with different patterns and geometry, sort of pop art-ish.”
Brown’s street fair offerings included prints of drawings and paintings in both realistic and abstract styles, along with three coloring books she self-published in 2021 on the subjects of mandalas, the flowers of the 50 states, and cryptids and creeps.
She was going to be at the March Arts Walk on Saturday, March 12, but her display will have to gather dust for just a little longer—the event has been canceled in anticipation of a snowstorm. So look for Brown at the April Arts Walk on April 9. She hopes to see a lot of people there checking out the artists’ and artisans’ displays. “Even if you don’t buy something, follow them on social media, share their stuff, give them kind words,” she says, maybe bringing the perspective of someone who traded a likely lucrative career in dentistry for a less certain future making our world more beautiful. “Because art is tough. When you have that support from your community, it means a lot.”
What’s next for Brown? Follow her @paytonbrown.art on Instagram to find out.
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