Irene Watson
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Irene Watson : Contemporary Abstract Artist

Irene Watson (°1966, Dundee, United Kingdom) is a contemporary abstract artist who mainly works in oil on linen or canvas. With a subtle minimalistic approach, often described as post-minimalist, Watson creates intense personal moments masterfully created by means of rules and omissions, acceptance, and refusal, luring the viewer into an aesthetic experience.

Her current body of paintings establishes a link between the landscape’s reality and that imagined by its conceiver.  By applying abstraction, she creates work in which a fascination with the clarity of content and an uncompromising attitude toward the personal experience can be found. The work is at times aloof and cool and neutral imagery is used, yet it remains a reference for the feminine, the gentle, and the sublime.

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Watson has stated that her work is influenced by the impressionist traditions which we can see referenced in the paintwork and the use of cool colour versus warm in some pieces. Yet, her influence of 1960’s Modernism, figure on field is strong as well as the domestic references of contemporary abstract artist such as Eva Hesse. The skill in her handling of paint, her strong use of colour embodies a training in modernism combined with a break from the tradition to a softer more personal approach. Her work bridges the gap between the self referential and the domestic anti-intellectual.

Watson states in discussion

“When I paint I feel the love of art history comes into my work; the hours I have spent in the Rothko room at the Tate profoundly influenced me. As I sat there I felt uplifted in the same way I feel when I stood in a cathedral or at a wide open landscape.

I try and bring this into my work. In a way I want my work to give something to the viewer...a sense of calm, or a sense of belonging...sometimes of a dark, warm enveloping.”

Her practice is a set of meticulously planned works resounding and resonating with a sense of a personal relationship. By exploring the concept of landscape in a nostalgic way, she investigates the dynamics of landscape, including the manipulation of its effects and the limits of spectacle based on our assumptions of what landscape means to us. Rather than presenting a factual reality, an illusion is fabricated to conjure the realms of our imagination.

In her domestic pieces, her works doesn’t reference recognisable form. The results are deconstructed to the extent that meaning is shifted and possible interpretation becomes multifaceted.

“My work is strongly influence by what is around me and being a mother to two beautiful daughters. I have spent the best part of the 90s concentrating on a domestic influence in my work. Rather than having a purely logical modernist approach, my work featured sensual curving forms. I used padding and stitching in the work. “Cotton Socks” was a real reference to the need for a domestic sterile environment for the children....one which I never achieved...it was as if I was searching for the need to achieve a motherhood devoid of stress and mess...icons of an unachievable world” .

“the multiples and diptyches to me are about relationships...it is an open ended question though ...it is relationships between one edge and another or one colour and another...but on a deeper level it can be relationships in landscape: the corn and the earth; the farmer and the walker; the guilt ridden mother and child. Not that you get that in all of my work. Each body or multiple is dealing with different things; pared down to an issue.”

Watson has used her skill as a contemporary abstract artist to open an artspace in a deprived area of Perth and has worked alongside some of the neediest in society to provide them with a safe haven for artistic expression. She has had a major influence on regenerating the area and providing a pathway to recovery for 100s of individuals that she has worked with over the 10 years that she has done this. In a sense, this is what her work embodies and resonates. It hides from the limelight, yet is influencing the artworld in a sensitive and generous form.

Irene Watson currently lives and works in St Madoes and can be contacted for a gallery viewing through this website.