The power of man and the power of nature meet in this dynamic and exciting work, which conjures the illusion of vast spatial depth, violent perspectival recession and mechanical speed from the flat surface of the paper. The wide road – the M11 motorway – on which the spectator also seems to be driving, abruptly recedes, curving round to the low Cambridgeshire horizon and sucking in the attention, pitting the spectator in a race with the car to the right as it too hurtles towards the horizon and the streak of light there, its brake lights fuzzy in the fine rain. A brilliant contemporary reimagining of road paintings by artists such as Pissarro.
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.