By Rachel Knight
J. Payne Lara, a professional bronze sculptor in Navasota, has commissioned art displayed across the Brazos Valley, the Lone Star State, the Netherlands, and China. While Lara is the first professional artist in his family, he grew up surrounded by talented relatives who created paintings, sculptures, quilts, dolls, clothing, and comforters. His Western heritage and exposure to his family’s talents inspired Lara to become a professional artist.
Lara, the inventor of an armature system that changed the way professional and amateur artists alike create sculptures, has completed around 60 commissioned pieces thus far in his career and says he looks forward to creating more art as he comes into his prime as a sculptor.
Contrary to the popular belief that art is created to capture the details of a moment or period of time, Lara says the artist’s real job is to understand a subject on a deeper level and convey that understanding to the viewer.
“People think somebody just hands you a photo and like when you’re drawing, you want to take this photo and make your art look like this photo,” Lara says. “If you’re doing that, what’s the point? Why create another photo with paint or whatever?”
Rather than try to perfectly reproduce the physical features of something, Lara focuses on displaying what makes them who they are internally. “If people look at one of my pieces and go, ‘Look at the detail,’ then I haven’t done my job,” Lara explains. “It’s not about the button on the shirt. It’s about conveying the message, the inner works or soul of whatever it is that you’re working with.”
Lara does research on each piece to determine what his sculpture should say. When people or animals depicted in his art are alive, he interacts with them in person. He is currently working on a commissioned piece of a doctor. When he met the doctor, Lara wanted to find out what it meant to him to be a general practitioner. “‘I just want people to know that I care,’” Lara recalls the doctor saying. “‘If something is wrong with you, I want to find out what is wrong with you. It bothers me until I can find out what is wrong with you and I can get you fixed.’ That told me what I needed to know about what I wanted to convey in the piece.”
When Lara cannot meet the person or animals he is depicting in his work, he must research them in other ways. This is especially true for his work at Veterans Park where he has done sculptures of American soldiers throughout America’s history.
“I didn’t know I was going to be a historian,” Payne says. “I don’t do extensive research, but I do enough research so that I understand the war and then I understand the subject matter in hand. … At the park, you’ve got one figure to try and explain an entire war. There is a lot that goes into that type of stuff.”
Lara says he works off two things: emotion and feel. He does not worry about the way a piece looks, but rather how it feels. “If you get the feel right, then the look is already there,” he says.
As Lara approaches the later half of his career, he says his passion to do great work is as strong as it has ever been. “I’ve done this so long now that the hardest part is other people’s expectations of you,” Lara shares. “When you create so many public pieces, you feel like one’s got to keep at least the same standard as the one before.”
