We are on south Dartmoor here, near the vast and ancient granite quarry of Merrivale. The central rise in this softly female and undulating moorland curves up to the lowering sky, and the vast roiling tumble of clouds reaches down to perch upon it. This is a contemporary take, perhaps, on the myth of Danaë, who was wooed by Zeus in the form of a shower of gold. The shower here is indescribably softer and more English, full of the subtle earth tones of fields, trees, hedges and hillsides, and the mild damp breath of the clouds. Pagan and pantheistic, it is the ultimate expression of poem by – say – Wordsworth.
Biographical details
Terry Watts is a London-based artist who was trained at Camberwell and Hammersmith Colleges of Art, and worked at first in landscaping projects. He moved to studying landscape through the medium of photography, and then from drawing to painting. His works are panoramic, combining an enhanced perspectival viewpoint and a frequently low horizon to give a sense of the vastness and sublimity of nature; they are rooted in a realistic topography, but blend features and motifs from separated areas to achieve a more emotionally accurate response to the land. Skies are of great importance in his paintings, as they were in the work of Turner and Constable; the low horizons and unusually deep vistas of clouds or clear skies stimulate the universal tendency to a pantheistic reaction to nature.
He has had solo exhibitions at the Stark Gallery (Canterbury and, later, London); and at galleries in Rochester, Kent; Broadway, Worcestershire; Tunbridge Wells, Kent; Bridport, Dorset; and Southwold, Suffolk; he has participated in many group exhibitions at provincial galleries, and has also shown at the Royal Society of British Artists (elected a member 2006), the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour, the Royal Society of Marine Artists, and the Royal Society of Birmingham Artists.
Works by Watts can be found in public, private and corporate collections in Britain, France, the Netherlands and the USA.
For further reading on this artist, please click here.