JULIAN WATSON

Julian Watson was born in 1952 in Teesdale, Northern England. His art education includes an honours degree in Fine Art from Leeds University and a diploma in picture conservation from Gateshead Technical College. He worked in the Ulster Museum, Belfast, as the Art Department’s galleries and exhibition officer and has extensive experience in exhibition organisation, working in this field as a freelancer as well. He has written, broadcast and lectured about art, been involved in aspects of community art and worked in film. He set up Crowquill, an art publishing project to produce books that marry the fine reproduction of sequences of images with poetic writing. His art practice has included exhibited painting, mural work and illustration. As an illustrator his work is to be found in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum and Moscow Library. He has exhibited his paintings in Belfast (Kerlin Gallery) and Edinburgh (Merz Gallery) as well as locally.

I paint primarily with the media of watercolour, ink and gouache on paper. Those are the materials that have been with me since I can remember and they remain fresh for me. My illustration work is one strand of many. In narrative I see one kind of series and it is sequences of art that interest me.

Recently I produced a progression of twenty-seven paintings working with the cycles of the seasons using aspects from Chinese ‘Five Elements’ philosophy. While abstract, these are still wholly based in connections with the natural world. I am now working towards using ways of painting that opened up for me in that series in new, representational works which express both natural energies and the rich incident of nature’s surfaces to which I was attracted before.

The art of geometry - and how it can inform creativity - has long been an inspiration for me. I am in the process of bringing to fruition, by means of drawings and sculpture, a particularly rich project whose processes, I intend, to gather later into a book.

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