Kathie Watson: Wats On

Between 1964 and 1975, Kathie Watson worked as a primary school teacher, then as a lecturer in Art & Craft and Early Childhood Education at Wellington Teachers College. In 1976 she started a fabric printing business in Wadestown, subsequently moving to Christchurch in 1978 to join her mother, Fanny Buss, painting and printing on silk over the following three decades. Watson’s current exhibition marks her fifth appearance at COCA since her debut Kindergarten show in 2006.

As Watson’s last COCA exhibition, Abracadabra For Hanly (2009), clearly illustrates, the painting of the late Patrick Hanly is an obvious point of reference. Like Hanly, Watson has an affinity for vibrant colour, painterly gesture and compositions that, for all their lively spontaneity, dispose flat, delineated shapes across the picture space with assurance and finesse. With its celebration of life and creativity through colour, movement and music (visual and aural), Watson’s work also bears comparison with that of near-contemporaries Jim Cooper or Ewan McDougall (both regular exhibitors at COCA). Rendered in broad splashes and dribbled highlights, the figures in Watson’s Musical Cats (2009) or Dance (2009) seem eminently suitable playmates for the multi-limbed, impasto squiggle-man in McDougall’s Wanna Dance? (2006) or Cooper’s grotesquely cute, cock-eyed, painted ceramic Cat (2006).

At the same time, the rather savage exploration of vice and extremity (albeit, self-mocking) that occasionally surfaces in McDougall’s paintings or Cooper’s sculptures is virtually absent from Watson’s work. Where McDougall’s The birth of Heinous (2007) or Cooper’s sculpted heroes of rock both satirize and glorify the ‘demon within man,’ in works like Boys’ Toys (2009), Watson presents parody of an altogether more gentle and affectionate variety. Indomitably optimistic, Watson’s Sea of Land show (2008) flourished hallucinogenic landscapes, responding to Milton’s blindness and the sentiments expressed in Paradise Lost with a panacea of colour and positivity. A similarly sanguine sensibility pervades Watson’s subsequent tribute to Hanly. Here, in addition to ‘boys and their toys,’ Watson presents wizards, masks, and figures engaged in dance and music. In a way that perfectly encapsulates her creative philosophy, Watson thus situates an act of remembrance within the context of a party for children, her reflection on human mortality providing the occasion for a celebration of life.

-David Khan

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