Brad Pitt Pop Art Black and White Pop Art Marilyn Monroe
Tall and lean, Xavier Payne walks into a Nashville, Tenn., coffee store as a confluence of styles. The 33-year-old artist wears a denim trucker over a '90s-era Brooks and Dunn-fashion pearl-snap shirt, Antipodal All-Stars screened with comic book panels, and a haircut half Patrick Mahomes, one-half Euro soccer mullet. "I want to keep my options open every bit far as where I could exist," he says, sitting down with tea, "but every bit far as where I'thousand from, yep, I'g from the South."
Payne, or XPayne as he'due south known in the art world, has been a ascension star since his higher days. "Blackness Pop," as he describes his style, is caricature-like, filled with vibrant, saturated colors and historical references, which span from the present to the hallowed ground of the golden age of hip-hop, the "Don't Tread on Me" founding fathers, and early African religions. The classification suggests Andy Warhol's 1950s Pop Art of love apple soup cans and Marilyn Monroe heads, and like the white Americana the progenitor immortalized, XPayne is doing the same, albeit with Black civilisation.
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"Trying to drag things that is every day to a certain walk of life," he says, "trying to brand things seem important."
Dissimilar Warhol, even so, XPayne has no desire for the spotlight, and rather than a glitzy Studio 54 order, he'south comfy at home in his studio, circling among a tight-knit group of friends, or quietly posting works to Instagram that spread like wildfire, often without attribution. "A handful of NBA players would post my work, not knowing who did it," he says.
"I didn't even proper noun myself XPayne," he continues. "That's my name, so I would sign my name on my works like [the late painter] Bob Ross, and people started calling me that. It'due south all near making pictures for me. That'due south the biggest matter."
From a humble two-bedroom apartment, XPayne has caught the optics of some major talent. Issa Rae of HBO'southward Insecure purchased a piece that appeared in an early season of the show as well as i for herself, while co-star Amanda Seales had XPayne design the logo for her Rae-produced YouTube show Get Your Life. Instagram has been a huge source of back up, with Wesley Snipes, Jada Pinkett Smith, DeRay Mckesson, and Outkast's Large Boi all giving shout-outs. He even had a collaboration with director Fasten Lee, who purchased a painting of Lee's fictional character Radio Raheem and and so licensed the epitome for a t-shirt later Do the Right Thing thespian Nib Nunn passed abroad in 2016.
Afterwards the collab with Lee, XPayne says with a laugh, "I guess I have something here."
Born in Flintstone, Mich., XPayne grew upwardly in Nashville from the age of five. His father was a Warhammer fan, and XPayne remembers watching his father pigment the tiny metal miniatures, which he says influenced his preferred colour palate. While his community was a Southern melting pot of ethnicities, some of his earliest memories were as well illustrative of race in America, and during the Christmas flavor, his female parent would paint the white Santa Claus ornaments with brown skin. He now knows what it would have been similar to take grown up in an all-black community thanks to his girlfriend, but his ain varied upbringing taught him circumspection. "There are but and so many emotions that you're going to go through in life, only I think in that location are unlike means of getting to that," he says. "We're all just feeling the same things in dissimilar ways."
Course schoolhouse fine art classes and encouraging teachers had their importance, but ane of the most significant influences on XPayne's early life and fine art was the '90s themselves. It was the dynamism of the decade's hip-hop-infused blackness culture, which ranged from the wild exploration of Kid 'n Play and Outkast to the pocket-size and fiercely proud HBCU sweatshirts of Queen Latifah on Living Single. "I captivated all that stuff and applied information technology to what I learned formally," he says. "My work is loud, and it's loud intentionally. Information technology's designed to come at you and go to you lot."
While his fine art is popular, he has also worked broadly in the commercial space, with card games, clothing, and branding campaigns. Slim and Husky's Pizza Beeria, a Nashville-founded pizza chain that at present has gone coast to coast with locations in Georgia and California, has had a longstanding relationship with XPayne. For three of its three and a one-half years in concern, XPayne has worked with the company, designing its logo also equally painting custom pieces for each of its seven locations. The basic blueprint is simple: Its three founders, 2 of whom are big guys and the third, rail-thin, are adapted to the destination city. In Atlanta, the characters wear Deion Sanders, Dominique Wilkins, and Hank Aaron jerseys; in Memphis, they're jookin'; and in Sacramento, they stroll past palm trees on a sandy embankment.
"[XPayne] narrates the civilisation," says Clint Gray, Slim and Husky'southward co-founder and its chief of marketing. "It's unique and nostalgic at the aforementioned fourth dimension, and information technology does a really adept chore of showing the cute parts of the African American experience."
Simply while XPayne's habitation may be in the South, that's not necessarily his time to come. Of late, he's recognized that his entire life has been spent in one region salvage for occasional travel, and he's growing restless. The French music he loves, the Japanese animation that impacted him, and the phone call of Western Africa, where his ancestors are from, all beckon. Then, like the blackness jazz musicians of the 1920s, James Baldwin in the 1940s and '50s, and Ta-Nehisi Coates in the 2010s, XPayne is looking abroad.
"It'due south the want to get far away from American culture," says the cultural narrator, looking out the window. "When yous come back to it, yous empathize it in different means."
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Source: https://www.themanual.com/culture/xpayne-feature/
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