Criticismism interview

Three weeks ago I met up with visual arts writer Mark Sheerin to talk about my artwork. I’m delighted to say that the resulting interview has now been published on his site:

I don’t believe in magic he tells me later in the East Brighton cafe to which we repair. But, dimly, I had thought of Paul Watson as a serious occultist, with a suitably esoteric vision. His last published body of work comprises of shadowy charcoal figure drawings of gloomy naked models. These subjects look so close to the relic-littered soil of old Albion. His drawings reference myth, pagan spirits, and a spirit of utter dejection which is very 2024. (Watson has an abiding interest in the English civil war).

To further characterise his drawing, I would say that his figures are very inward. In charcoal, their bodies are pale or grimy, never warm or especially inviting. Whereas classical life drawing conveys a sense of anatomical fidelity, Watson seems to dispense with flesh in favour of bone. His men are stony or grave rather than vigorous; his women perhaps dented rather than curvaceous.

Their environment can change; it is a background of midnight black in that series, a featureless sepia desert in the latest. Sanguine pencils, rather than charcoal, give his figures renaissance pedigree, quite at odds with the mood of fin de siècle Viennese expressionism. His photography, in which he shifts gears again, is stark and notable for the models’ otherworldly masks; and Watson makes these himself.

Masks lend his sitters an air of atavistic power. It will amaze you, for instance, how a muzzle of ivy or an eye mask of oak leaves can imbue a stranger with great mystery and potency. You wouldn’t want to meet many of these photographic subjects on a dark night, and yet in their world it is always night.

You can read the full interview on Mark’s site at https://criticismism.com/interview-paul-watson/.