Gary Watson

Painter, Writer and Wildlife Advocate. My earliest memories are of small farm living and listening to my grandmother tell stories. Six decades later, I wrote three novels between2005 and 2016: Leaving the Bones Behind, Gabriel's Covenant and Mercy in Masquerade, available on Amazon. In 2015 I set my pen aside, discovered a group of talented artists and began to paint.

To my surprise the art forms melded and storytelling, the fictional kind, threaded them. With an abundance of curiosity, little fear and a willingness to let intuition guide my strokes and color choices I embarked. Capturing the essence and not the detail of what you see and feel is the art, much like the first sentence in a novel that makes you want more. Sometimes you find it. Sometimes it works. Sometimes a pause leads you nowhere. Other times it takes you every where and when it does the clarity seen is crystal and heart filling. Hopefully my paintings do a little of that.

My work has evolved rapidly since 2015 in a progression from watercolor, acrylic, acrylic mixed media and more recently into oil using various mediums like oil/wax and water based acrylics the synthetic paper, YUPO. Over many years I’ve learned words are about one thing … wild is about wild no matter the form it takes until its pushed to say something else. Brush strokes are about many things until they’re not. So come, poke around in my Gallery and enjoy your journey.

“One now distant day in a canyon by a river I spotted marks. Petroglyphs eight to ten thousand years old. Human expression. Fingerprints, stick figures, animals— all defining marks of what being human means. When I touched them I felt awe, the desire to want to know the makers, share their stories and just be in the presence of what they left behind. That’s what these marks on 50 million year old canyon walls, scribed on colorful layers of basalt and ash dramatized. Marks of form, shape, thought and feeling left behind as soul food for generations to come. Flash forward. All artists sense the digital age has forever changed art. All art? Maybe. But I’d like to think that what comes from the soul, stays there and is a wellspring like no other. When I think about making marks I think about those ancient fingerprints, feel the awe and want to give back — that’s what inspires me.”

- Gary Watson


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Gregory Gorham