We recently connected with Carmen Moses and have shared our conversation below.
Carmen , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.
I’ve been creative my entire life. I was always “the kid who draws”, and spent most of my youth drawing and writing creatively. The “get a real job” energy was prevalent in my surroundings, so in 5th grade I decided I wanted to be a micro-biologist. I adore science as much as art, and it has been a recurring theme for me artistically. In high school, I started getting into performing arts, including music, dance, and drama, but I was still a prolific writer and artist. I always felt the drive to create and problem solve, and had a very vivid imagination. I originally wanted to be a writer, but ended up floating from job to job, career option to career option. In 2005 I started college at Augusta University (At the time, was Augusta State University) and jumped from art to creative writing, to psychology- I continued wrestling with the idea that art was “not a real job” and that I had to find something that would make “real money”…Because of that I ended up dropping out and moving to Augusta Tech- I thought if i combined my creativity with something lucrative, I would be happy. I ended up taking two years of culinary arts, thinking that I would be a good pastry chef; making pretty things that people would be willing to pay for. Although it was a plan that made sense at the time, it wasn’t exactly “following my heart”…just trying to problem solve how to stay creative and not starve. I dropped out again, still unhappy, and worked in cell phone tech support, retail, and restaurant service for several years, and creatively starved. I still wrote, drew, but occupied space in my life as a hobby- and art for me has never been a “just” hobby. It’s life, it’s as essential to me as air, food, and water. There was just this huge disconnect for me. I tried school one more time in 2015, and told myself “This time, you are doing the thing that makes you happy, not the thing that you think will be the most profitable.” In 2018 I graduated with my BFA in Photography and Printmaking. I wanted to be a photographer and a printmaker, as those are the subjects that I gravitated towards and ended up loving in that final college stretch. I ended up in the right place at the right time, and got connected with the Jessye Norman School of the Arts. My intent was to come in and look at teaching photography- but again, life had other plans. I ended up teaching drama, and from there, all of the time I thought I wasted revealed itself to be time well spent; all of the random skills I learned from jumping from job to career path, etc, ended up being the perfect combination for teaching, administration, and problem solving. My job isn’t just one thing- It requires creativity in so many different ways, and satisfies that need I have to do something meaningful that will sustain myself and my family financially, and nourishes that creative drive and makes use of all of the creative and professional skills I have acquired during the weird limbo that was my 20’s. So long story short, I’ve always known I wanted to pursue art as a career, but what I took to make that really happen was ignoring the naysaying voices around me, and tuning into the encouraging ones- especially the one inside myself I kept ignoring.
Carmen , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
This is a great segue from the last question! First and Foremost, I am a creative. My current job employs a lot of my creative “swiss army knife” of skills- Mainly creative problem solving. Beyond that I am a digital artist and writer. My college experience and day job as a performing arts director and arts administrator/instructor have helped give me the foundation to explore my personal artistic voice. My pseudonym is Payasa- the spanish feminine of the word clown- a word which often has negative connotation as someone/something that is silly and childish. For me, it’s something different. It is a drive towards joy, and celebration of life despite how absolutely awful it can be sometimes! Payasa started off as a graffiti name- I had all but given up art in 2009, but ended up working at a call center with an amazing graffiti artist, Shawn (Graff name: Satire), who looked at some of my old drawings and told me I needed to pick art back up and make it into something. He taught me graffiti lettering and structure, and the persona of Payasa started to build from there- conceptually my art covers both joy and sorrow, often with a dark sci fi twist- As a fan of sci fi, cartoons, and horror movies growing up, my creative pool became beautifully bizarre. My senior art exhibition was a display of biotechnical/biomechanical concepts with heavy influence from the music of Janelle Monae, the art of Geiger, the Italian Renaissance, and various religions/ spiritual themes. It was an incredibly deep exploration of the convergence of humanity with technology, and these themes continue into my digital artwork today. (payasaart.com)
Fast forward to the pandemic- I found myself wrestling with my artistic side, and honestly, just wrestling with life and survival, and found myself in a pretty depressed place. How could i realistically get up and take studio time when everything was wrong- I turned to my phone for comfort, as we all do, but still felt creatively starved. What ended up coming out of that period of time was fierce determination to create despite all of the mental and emotional issues exacerbated by the plague- I turned to digital drawing on my phone, and just kept practicing until I got the hang of it. If I was going to mindlessly play with my phone, I might as well teach myself something. I used some characters I drew in college- the Skellybots – as a springboard into learning how to draw on my phone- They are basic and cartoony, perfect for practice. That turned into a series of drawings and an entire world building experience. (Cartoons have always been a huge part of my life- from Looney Tunes to Nicktoons, Cartoon network, etc- I always dreamed of being a cartoonist, among other things, but that was another allegedly “non-serious” job option I didn’t put much stock into until later in life)
The more digital drawing proficiency I gained, the more complex drawings I was willing to tackle. With the encouragement of friends, I continued working on Skellybots, (skellybots.com) which are a series of cartoons I drew as a break from the more serious, conceptually heavy work, and they help me laugh at the existential dread instead of being mired in it. From this came an entire world of lore- stories, comics, and the like that satisfied my need to write and draw. The short version- Interstellar archeologists find the voyager golden record, fall in love with Chuck berry, and try to make it to earth to meet him but ran into a miscalculation, coming to earth after humanity had already been wiped out. The rest is basically them going through our cultural remnants and trying to decipher our often absurd culture. I’ve basically been bouncing back and forth between the cartoons and more serious biomechanical/biotechnical drawings (All drawn on my generally regular sized cell phone.) The Skellybot project also led to a spectacular collaboration with my daughter, a skilled digital artist and storyteller who created another series of in-universe characters- the Blocky Beez. The Beez are a series of merch and drawings encouraging people to “BEE” themselves. (Blockybeez.com). Now, all of this probably sounds like a lot of different tracks to have trains on, and gosh darnit, I agree. Payasaart, Skellybots, and Blockybeez all still follow alot of my favorite themes (science, art, tech, and humanity) but are three very different projects all coinciding in the same space, along with my creatively taxing (but super fun and rewarding) day job which also includes graphic and web design, in addition to teaching both visual and performing arts. I feel like a “jack of all trades”, but with assistance from my family and friends, we are hoping to invest the most time and energy into my daughters Blocky Beez project and launch a worldwide brand that inspires positivity, individuality, and community- On the table for discussion has been mobile games, comics, and expanding our merch line, as well as continue to build the universe that both the blocky beez and skellybots reside in. So far in development we have the Blocky Beez Epic origins comic, a skellybots comic on webtoons pertaining to the origin of their species (spoiler alert, they didn’t always look like skeletons), as well as three other publications. Everything is still pretty early in development.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
As a grown up person, I find more and more things to unlearn- almost as many things as I find to learn. I think the biggest lesson i’ve had to unlearn is giving into conformity, and feeling shame about the things that make us uniquely human. As the world gets more and more open and accepting of all of the things I tried so desperately to hide- my cultural identity, mental illness struggles, body image issues etc- It’s becoming easier to unlearn. I couldn’t have done this without the amazing and supportive creative community that I am humbled and privileged to be a part of. I’ve had to unlearn the shame that had so desperately entwined itself in those things- Depression, Anxiety, and PTSD are just things in my body I live with and navigate. I had to really untangle those traumas and circumstances and remember that its okay to not be okay, it’s okay to fall as long as you pick yourself back up.The things that you are, are just the things that you are. It’s what you do with them that counts (Cliche, but so true!) Unlearning shame and stigma helped me grow as an artist and professional by leaps and bounds. I stay open and communicate about the things I have difficulty with in hopes that it’ll help someone else- my way to hopefully create a legacy and help the world be a little better after I meet my inevitable end. Community, social shifting, and art have helped me navigate and confront these things. I remind myself (and often my students) that we didn’t come into this world walking straight from the womb- we had to fall and keep going. Walking and any other skill we need to learn are no different. Everything I am as an artist stems from unlearning shame, and really leaning into “There’s no shame in making mistakes”.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)
I almost chose the resilience question, but I feel like I could talk about that all day- the life of a creative is full of moments of resilience. NFT’s- I still don’t have a great grasp on NFT’s, but thought this question was interesting for a few reasons. I answered an artist call a few years ago for a group/artistic movement called “Techspressionism.” (techspressionism.com)- It was like, everything I loved in one group- tech, science, art, computers, etc, and just ended up meeting (virtually) some of the most amazing artists (I still feel like a kid at the grownups table, completely unworthy of being amongst this group of geniuses). I did a presentation on the Skellybots and some of my digital pieces, and in the zoom call was one of the founders of Niftorian, the worlds first NFT accelerator. (niftorian.com) – I ended up being in the first cohort with Skellybots as my NFT project. I learned a lot from the process, and there are some Skellybot and Payasa NFT’s on Opensea and Foundation. The Skellybots “research photographs” and a generative PFP collection came out of this experience, as well as renewed focus on world-building for these characters. I haven’t pushed much farther into the NFT world since, but it remains on my radar and i’m incredibly grateful to have had that experience. It’s really cool to be among the first in both of these groups, and hopefully I will get some traction/revisit NFT’s at some point.
Contact Info:
- Website: payasaart.com, skellybots.com, blockybeez.com
- Instagram: @payasaart, @skellybots, @blockybeez
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PayasaArt/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carmen-moses-0a16aa102/
- Twitter: @Art_payasa
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3SEmmFQR4ixD-0BwWitfMw
Image Credits
These are all my images. :)