Artist Profile

James K. M. Watts has journeyed from the vast deserts of Nevada and Arizona to the pagan sun bursts of Lithuania seeking inspiration for his singular vision. Born in San Francisco, the natural beauty of the American West was his starting point. “I have always been enchanted by views and vistas and their relationship to the solitary wanderers who carry with them their own inner landscapes. The eye acts as a kind of threshold between these two worlds.”

In the early Nineties James began an ongoing series of sculptures combining wood, stone, wire and found material. “I wanted to create objects pulled from an alternative nature, recognizable, yet completely different from our own.”

James searched for the right ground on which to portray the wild, peaceful, color-saturated world of his sculptures in pictorial space. After experimenting with a wide range of materials, he found that slate provided the ideal ground to compliment the weight, light and color of these acrylic landscapes. "The ancient age and wonderful varieties of colors and textures unique to different slates from all over the world add to the meaning and presence of the paintings. And although the landscapes themselves are vast and filled with wonder, I wanted the physical experience with the viewer to be on a small, intimate, almost private scale." James continues to follow these two fertile paths of artistic exploration as if a wanderer in their worlds. "The world of these paintings and sculptures... it’s where I want to be.”

James has exhibited his work at the Ward-Nasse Gallery in New York as well as in over 50 solo, group and juried shows in Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. His work has been featured at the Kochi Museum of Art in Kochi, Japan, as well as the Sun City Museum of Art in Arizona, and the Museum of American Illustration in New York City.

Praise for James K. M. Watts
"... Paintings of other worldly scenes with a peculiar radiance framed in darkness and silhouetted against shimmering skies... The artist provokes curiosity and invites speculation without offering any tangible clues to interpretation...”
Helen A. Harrison, The New York Times

“ ‘I’m attempting a kind of magic,’ notes this San Francisco artist, ‘an Alchemy of matter and light. These objects are pulled, lifted from a world of deep primordial beauty. A rough world at peace with itself.’ There is a sense of durability to these paintings, and despite the feel of early civilization in many of the images, there are also figures that pay deference to Zen and Feng Shui imagery.” George Wallace, The Northport Journal