Jesse Payne is an Associate Professor at VCUarts Qatar, a former Doha Fire Station Artist-in-Residence, and a three-time award-winning educator. His work has been exhibited at the Mathaf Museum of Modern Art and Manifest Gallery, and his teaching bridges traditional studio practice with emerging technologies including artificial intelligence. He lives and works in Doha, Qatar.
YOU’RE NOT THE CREATOR OF A PAINTING, YOU ARE THE CREATOR OF THE MOMENT OF BEING A PAINTER.
Creating the Conditions
I've come to understand that the best work doesn't come from chasing an outcome — it comes from building the conditions where something unexpected can arrive. In the studio, that means layering marks until the painting starts to talk back. In the classroom, it means designing projects where students surprise themselves. Philip Guston said he wanted "to make something I have never seen before." That impulse — the willingness to stay in the unknown — is what connects my painting, my drawing, and my teaching.
“Exploring the space between observation and invention through painting, drawing, and teaching.”
I began as a painter focused on precision — the structure of form, light, and space. Over time, I became more interested in what happens beneath that structure — the accidents, revisions, and discoveries that occur when control gives way to process.
That shift deepened during a ten-month residency at the Doha Fire Station, where I produced three solo exhibitions: One Dust, a series of large-scale oil paintings exploring sandstorms as metaphor; By the Light of the Moon, paintings from nighttime explorations of disappearing Doha neighborhoods; and Untitled, oil paintings of migrant workers confronting anonymity and erasure. Living and working in Qatar since 2010 has shaped every part of my practice.
My recent work has moved further into abstraction — the Disrupted Portals, Frequency Drawings, and Cyanotapestries series explore thresholds where form dissolves into energy and mark-making becomes a meditative act. In 2025–26 alone, I produced fifty new works across five series.
Teaching plays a vital role in this evolution. Projects I develop for students — from Hooded Alchemy and Cultural Threads to AI-assisted image generation — push my own material thinking in directions I wouldn't reach alone. Whether in the studio or the classroom, I remain committed to one idea: that making art is a way of learning about the world — and ourselves.