Christine Watson PS

Statement

Christine’s work employs colour to explore qualities of light and shade, space and place. Her subject matter is drawn from villages, towns and cities, many around the Mediterranean and North Africa, for the abstract qualities of spaces, light and shade, crumbling and ageing surfaces and vibrant colours. They seek to reveal the richness of steps and stairways, walls and roofs, windows and doors, streets and alleyways – the fabric of habitation – are revealed as they are, aged by wear and weather, without sentiment or nostalgia.

Methodology

My pastel technique is to build up layer after layer until I achieve the desired colour and tone. The pigments mix on the paper and I darken as I progress (to avoid dust getting into the light tones) so there is a subtle base of colour shining through. I avoid blending by hand as I find it lessens the intensity of the colours, which is my absolute priority.

Marks are apparent if you look closely, but not so apparent that they distract. At art school I was taught (by Patrick Heron, John Hoyland, Gillian Ayres, Vanessa Jackson and others) that decorative mark-making was the territory of the textile department, and you shouldn't put in what's not necessary - subject, colour and form were the priorities and anything else would compromise the clarity of intent – and I guess that has stayed with me! 

I discovered pastels when I inherited a huge Rowney box from my grandmother along with a substantial H-frame easel. Soft pastels were frowned upon at Winchester – like watercolours they were seen as the tools of the knitters and weavers – and we painters were the real artists who bathed in acrylics and made monumental paintings. After Winchester and the Slade, I felt free to explore new media and to shift from the prevailing abstraction to figurative, and around 1985 I started exhibiting my pastels.

I love worn surfaces and the spaces between walls and buildings. Greece has long provided the right subject matter and light, but more recently in Morocco I have explored pink and brown madder (Marrakech), raw sienna (Fez) and difficult blues (Chefchaoun). The camera is my sketchbook. Discreet and spontaneous, it helps me capture potential images, and from these I derive an underlying composition which I edit and adjust. I am selective and eliminate what’s not needed, avoiding superficial pattern and decoration.

Above all else I am passionate about colour. Working with pastels is itself a journey in painstakingly mixing and matching colours that best represent the image I am working from. The colours evolve from deliberately poor-quality laser prints, which allows me the freedom to create my own palette. I am never happier than grappling with different reds and browns or mixing greys with just the right hint of green or purple. Although I have many hundreds of pastels, I never seem to have the right colour, so I persevere obsessively until I am satisfied. Recent experiments in working on coloured paper has added a new dimension to the colour mixing and has helped me find new directions.

As a printmaker I find mezzotints work well in parallel with my pastels, even down to the similar rhythmic processes of applying pastel or burnishing out the light in a plate. The rhythmic process of scraping and burnishing has a similar feel to the way I apply my pastels, although with mezzotints you are moving from dark to light. I have also always worked in either oils or acrylics alongside my pastels, and I enjoy the challenge of reworking an image in a different medium. This feeds back subtly into my pastels, helping to make the next work better than the last.

Bio

Christine Watson studied at Winchester School of Art (winning the Bateson Mason Drawing Prize in 1980) and the Slade School of Fine Art and was recipient of the Abbey Award in Painting with a residency at the British School at Rome in 1995. She teaches art classes in Muswell Hill and Barnet and was a part-time fine art lecturer at Barnet Southgate College. Christine regularly holds demonstrations and crits, and her structured classes formed the basis of her book ‘Art Therapy’, commissioned by Arcturus in 2017. Christine was elected as a member of the National Association of Acrylic Painters (NAPA) in 2017 and the Pastel Society in 2022. A member of the Printmakers Council and an honorary member of Islington Art Society, she has curated many group exhibitions around London.

Christine’s work in pastels, acrylic and print has been exhibited widely, not least at the Pastel Society Annual Exhibition on eight occasions (winning the Schmincke Prize in 2015 and 2021). Her work, catalogues of which were published in 1994, 2003 and 2008, is held in private collections in Europe, America, Australia and the Far East and public collections including the V&A in London, Peterborough City Art Gallery and the National Print Archive at Scarborough Art Gallery.