The Creeps

"Don't go that far into the arroyo, that's where La Llorona lives," local artist Lindsay Payton recalls hearing after school one day. Not even 10, Payton's family had recently moved to New Mexico from California, and while she didn't know it yet, she was already developing her artistic sensibilities. That story, told by a classmate, stuck with her.

"For the most part I'm always thinking creepy, spooky things," Payton says today.
"Urban legends and folk tales; the first time I heard about La Llorona, it terrified me so much. It was so cool."

Payton is preparing for her next show, A Ghost Upon the Floor at Eye on the Mountain Gallery, which features a series of 13 multi-media hybrid paintings/illustrations on paper as well as other pieces on woodblock. Payton uses pen and ink, acrylic, pastels and watercolors and says much of the work was inspired by the writing of Edgar Allan Poe; many of the pieces appear upon the torn-out pages of a Poe paperback she's carried with her for more years than she can remember. At first glance, it would be easy to brush the work off as cartoony, and there's a certain element that approaches that, but the pieces are fun and distinctive, oddly familiar; you'll never mistake a Payton for someone else's work, and besides, she is self-taught and trying to tell a story based in a shared cultural love of fear—the fun kind. It would be even easier to write it off as Halloween ephemera, but Payton has studied her source material diligently and improves every day—there is no one season for her illustrations and, she says, she's evolved in the nearly five years she's been developing the style.

"I started by telling myself, 'a drawing a day, a drawing a day,'" she says.

One early vampire-based project spurred inspiration through a self-imposed word game wherein Payton would replace the word "love" with "blood" in popular song titles, then illustrate a piece based in the new phrase.

"It was like 'I'm All Out of Blood' and 'The Power of Blood,'" she says.

She also explored the concept of cryptids, or pseudo-scientific monster lore, like Mothman and Bigfoot, both wildly famous as imagery goes, but also ripe for a deeper narrative. Originally, Payton wanted to be a writer, and while she still nurses that dream, visual art has taken a more prominent role. If her name sounds familiar, it's probably because of her work with local writers like Bucket Siler and Stephanie Alia. With Alia and the book Scintillating Stories, Payton visited San Diego's ComicCon last year, but her work with Siler on the 2017 zine/short story Pigtail Girls is especially excellent; dark and foreboding and the perfect accompaniment to a dreary fairytale about disappearing orphans and the quest to save them.

"I look back now and kind of cringe," Payton says with a laugh. "It's older work, but the story was something I would absolutely want to read, and it was pretty much free rein."

Payton says this can be daunting for an artist, particularly one whose bedrock is based in minimal technical knowledge. But it does bring up an interesting point about who can or should be an artist. For the record, it's anyone who makes art, but Payton might put it more succinctly:

"I know you're supposed to learn the rules before you break them, and that works for some people, sure," she says, "but being self-taught has been nice. I can evolve into other areas, especially now that I feel so comfortable in my own style."

Still, she says, "I feel like I don't get taken very seriously in the art world, but galleries like Eye on the Mountain and KEEP Contemporary like my stuff enough and don't think it's kitschy and novelty. I'm very grateful that people see something in it as much as I do."

Indeed, Payton's work has sold readily at KEEP, and the upcoming takeover of an
entire area at Eye on the Mountain is indicative of her rise. Throw in a few album cover designs and other upcoming shows and collaborations, and it's easy to see why people are responding: No one else in town is doing anything quite like Lindsay Payton.

A Ghost Upon the Floor: 
5 pm Friday Sept. 20. Free.
Eye on the Mountain Gallery,
614 Agua Fria St.,
928-308-0319