Jen­ny Watson
Hors­es, Hol­ly­wood Love and Sleep

Jen­ny Wat­son’s art makes the per­son­al feel uni­ver­sal and, con­verse­ly, the uni­ver­sal per­son­al. In Hors­es, Hol­ly­wood Love and Sleep, she takes recog­nised sym­bols and images and imbues them with the intimate.

The line between expe­ri­ence and day­dreams is delib­er­ate­ly blurred. The actu­al­i­ty of the moment is irrel­e­vant. Scenes of her life (imag­ined, real) are roman­tic in their sim­plic­i­ty and vivid in their impact through the use of Japan­ese pig­ment. In these works, colour – ever bold­er, ever more psy­cho­log­i­cal – is a char­ac­ter in its own right, the nar­ra­tive of each frame enhanced by its assertion.

These are works done at leisure. Cre­at­ed from the forced sta­sis of time in lock­down, they are a qui­et prompt, an invi­ta­tion to sit with the poet­ics of nos­tal­gia. Watson’s ever-keen and ten­der obser­va­tions of every­day life offer a break from the idea that the nat­ur­al response to cri­sis is chaos. Rather, these new paint­ings invite some­thing far more sig­nif­i­cant: contemplation. 

She rumi­nates on old Hol­ly­wood tales; on Chit­ty Chit­ty Bang Bang; on the ela­tion of the first time atop a horse; on qui­et, pri­vate spaces shared by humans and ani­mals. These motifs are not new for Jen­ny Wat­son. They are imme­di­ate­ly famil­iar, their sym­bol­ism an expan­sion of a visu­al lan­guage that the artist has spent her career composing.

This rep­e­ti­tion of theme and image has defined Jen­ny Watson’s work for more than forty years. Through this explo­ration of her life, in Hors­es, Hol­ly­wood Love and Sleep each scene is a dream shared. 

Claire Sum­mers