About Us

My father was a captain in the US Navy and my family traveled extensively through Europe during the three years that he was assigned to duty in Paris. The museums of Europe fired my imagination. I tried, but could not match, the great works of the past. Such skill cannot be attained by any modern artist.

Returning from France I started studying at MICA in Baltimore. There I studied sculpture and learned to open my mind to modern art. We are what we are. We cannot be that which we are not.

I am blessed (or afflicted) to have a wide variety of artistic interests and goals. I was drawing and painting from an early age and I was privileged at MICA to have outstanding drawing teachers. Later on, in Los Angeles, I further developed my drawing ability in the Animation industry. I paint in oil, watercolor, acrylic, and ink.

Before I got into animation, I worked at a publishing house in Los Angeles where I was the manager of the photo department. When Photoshop emerged, I became an early adopter. Photoshop was wonderful. It immediately eliminated physical airbrushing, transparency dying, and a host of other labor-intensive activities. It also introduced me to the world of digital paint. Digital painters are just now coming into their own. It will be many years before they are widely recognized.

During my time in animation, I developed an interest in ceramics. I loved the great age of that art and that ceramics seemed relatively impervious to time. Ceramics was a huge field so I limited myself to making tiles -bird tiles because I loved birds.

I had been playing music since I was a teenager. I loved music and loved playing music with my friends. In 2004 I went to live with my aging dad in Florida until he passed in 2014. During that time, I started writing fiction and writing music. My musical pieces are written in Finale and they are just musical ideas.
I have never had the chance to produce actual music.

Now I am a co-director of the Pike Road Art Center in Alabama. It is a nonprofit center devoted to creating a local appreciation of art and to aiding the development of local artists. In this position I have become aware of how important art is to an individual’s spiritual, intellectual, and psychological growth and how important it is to society.

Charles Payne