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PETER WATTS

Light Through Color

paintings and installation sculpture

PETER WATTS, painter and constructionist, has lived a life experienced deeply in nature, with the vine-covered woods of Wellfleet summers, and star-lit skies of winter.  In his new show at the Berta Walker Gallery, Watts offers us what feels like his Nature Opus, a symphony of two major movements, his very recent paintings and the exciting gift of his bull-briar, bamboo and stick constructions, consciously inspired by the “cargo cults” of New Guinea.  This is the practice of Pacific islanders, exposed to military cargoes dropped by U.S. planes during WWII,  imitating the entire process in their attempt to get more of this “manna” from heaven.

             “My structures, an antenna (made of vertically stacked briar spheres) and a satellite, ephemeral beings, are a continuation of their idea of  constructing life-size mockups of airplanes , control towers and even landing strips out of straw.  Working with vines and sticks helps me move in this 'primitive' direction,” explains Watts, who like so many modern Western artists before him (Braque, Picasso, Gaughin, to name only a few), have been inspired by the so-called “primitive”  (the “discovery” of other aesthetics, particularly African and Oceanic, by the West).   But unlike these other artists, Watts has spent most of his adult artistic life developing a deep understanding of the landscape he has lived in and painted for decades.  “I live in the woods,” Watts shares.   And it is in this context of living with nature that Watts has created his own personal “primitive” iconography, both in his painting, and over the last five years, in these constructions that flow from these landscape paintings (note his mark making, reminiscent of, or made by, sticks or branches, for example) and that come directly from what Watts forages from nature.   “I go around looking for trees that have yellow moss for the color moss I’m looking for.”   There is a recent introduction of color as an additional element to the bull briar material that Watts’ refers to as “nature’s own Velcro,” reflecting the painter as ever at work with color even while working with three-dimensional material.  

               In a very real sense, the vine constructions are the simplification of the paintings.   Watts paints from nature, his source.  How natural then to “sculpt” literally with nature. 

This show reflects what an inventive artist can do with a major theme over a mature lifetime.  In the manner of almost every major artist in the West, Watts has honed, mined, re-invented, and continually explored new ways of seeing what is right before our eyes, moving toward greater simplicity and strength with the raw plastic elements of modern painting: shape, color, and atmosphere,  what Wolf Kahn referred to “as re-doing Rothko through Nature.   “I am a camera.  I paint what I know not what I see.  The images are in my brain,” Watts shares. His landscapes are the best of what physical and emotional memory can convey in a plastic medium, the changing light and silhouettes of the seasons.   They are “light through color.”

               This is an exciting show for the viewer’s ability to see how painting and construction, seemingly different genres, are, in Watts evolution, two aspects of the same whole.  As he says of these mature paintings (“Winter Valley,” “Herring River,”  “Midnight Clear,”  “Red Berries,” “On the Edge,” and others):   “I simplify, reduce the composition, increase the contrast, to make the painting a powerful single statement” --  comments that reflect his vine briar work, as well.  Working with continuous lengths of bull briar up to 20 to 30 feet long, Watts molds it into randomly wrapped circles within circles, forming one sphere that the viewer can look through and wonder at the human hand that could have molded them.   They intrigue, as they seem to reflect a physically impossible feat, as well as invoke the magic that is inherent with real artmaking: when symbol becomes more powerful than real life.      “Primitive” hasn’t often looked this subtle or conceptual, something the Islanders already knew.  

As New York art critic Margaret Sheffield wrote:  “Watts’ best paintings are abstractions of nature, vibrations of tone.  Besides evoking heat, climate, and the awe of a particular light, he evokes, like Rothko, a darker side of nature at once foreboding and spiritual.”

Peter Watts has lived on the Cape since 1954.  Living at first in Provincetown and working at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Watts later moved to Wellfleet, bringing his young bride painter Gloria Nardin to Wellfleet year-round in 1970.   In 1978, he joined the Board of FAWC,  and in 1980 he became a Trustee of PAAM on which he still serves.   This is Watt’s third exhibition at Berta Walker Gallery.