Jason Watson is a mixed-media artist, whose work combines interests in the figure, found objects, and text as visual material. He currently teaches as an Assistant Professor of Drawing in the art department at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. Watson’s work is has been shown at galleries, universities, and non-profit spaces including the solo exhibit, “Jason Watson: A Second Look”, at the Jersey City Museum in 2007 – 2008. His artist residencies over the past several years include the Newark Museum of Art, Cooper Union Emerging Artist Residency Program, the Lower East Side Printshop, the Elsewhere Artist Collaborative in Greensboro, NC, and the Ragdale Foundation in Chicago in summer 2011. He is an active member of Queer Caucus for Art and has presented several papers and projects with QCA at recent College Art Association conferences, including “Creating in the Queer Diaspora”, a study of LGBTQ creative production in non-urban areas. Watson has also worked as a graphic and exhibitions designer for the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York and has served on fellowship committees for the New York Foundation for the Arts. His recent mixed media collages and works on paper focus on studies of the “notional” and chance encounters with objects, figures, patterns, and images that confound or explode narrative suggestion when placed together on the same page. Watson is currently working on the self-published artist book “Fremde”, based on a collection of found photographs collected while on an artist residency at the Oberpfalzer Kunstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany.

    “There is something very curious in semantics, that the word ‘meaning’ is probably, in the whole language, the word the meaning of which is the most difficult to find. What does ‘to mean’ mean? It seems to me that the only answer we can give is that ‘to mean’ means the ability of any kind of data to be translated in a different language.”

 

    Drawing from observation is my personal translation of the physical world into meaningful images. I draw and paint to investigate and manipulate structures, spaces, and surfaces; to play with how meaning attaches to visual ideas or abandons those ideas through the creative process.

    

    I am particularly interested in how certain things I encounter, particularly faces, bodies, and manmade objects, both reveal and obscure private histories when I draw them. People and the things they use and value or casually discard (furniture, clothing, decorative collectibles, toys, kitchen utensils…) are my favorite subjects for painting, drawing, and collage. They intrigue me with both their potential to tell specific stories, often through the nuance of gesture or marks of use, and to keep the details of those stories forever hidden. For this reason, I am particularly drawn to two contradictory sources for inspiration and subject matter: thrift stores and museum collections. I am fascinated by the infinite possibilities of individual triumph or folly that could place an object or a body in one of these environments.

 

    I have visited museums and thrift stores around the world to seek out new image material for my work. In the past several years I have sketched and documented potential subjects in Germany, Italy, Mexico, and South Africa. My process for making new work often begins with the physical displacement of travel, which I find both disorienting and visually exhilarating. I am increasingly interested in the “notional” aspect of the encounters I have with objects, faces, and bodies while on the move; the chance desires or momentary whims that encourage the visual study of one subject over another at any given place and time. Through sketching on site and contemplation, questions I have about the possible histories of people and their objects develop into a specific visual language on the page: scrawling lines and passages of pattern, collage, and text that float and tangle around the things I depict. These visual ideas are then worked out in larger, more layered compositions once I return to my studio.

 

    The figure first entered my work through the rendering and study of sculptures and portrait busts from the museums I visited. However my current interest is shifting; I now spend much more time drawing from live models in a collaborative life drawing studio and considering the narrative possibilities that actual faces and bodies can suggest when taken in this specific context. The life drawing studio offers a unique opportunity to consider the meanings we attach to individual faces and gestures; it provides a beautifully artificial space outside of casual daily experience to take on this investigation.