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Artist Information: @pyncelhair
Photography: @joshuascarratt
Born in the Cathedral City of Truro, Jack Watson lives, observes, and creates in London, England. Working primarily in abstraction, Watson’s work is deeply informed by history–not only the medium itself, but the process individuals undertake, mining the conscious and subconscious before materials begin to shape an idea. For Watson, embracing the liquidity of abstraction creates a uniquely symbiotic relationship between paint and painter; a dynamic tethered to his respect for the origin of those materials and the “sublimation of ego.”
Throughout our conversation, we pulled at the threads of ideas: abstraction, perfection, and reflection. Is the quest to resolve outweighed by the search to understand? Neither of us seemed concerned in metrics, but rather, the weight of questions themselves.
ANTHONY PAPPALARDO: Could you tell me about what led you to the current medium and method for your work?
JACK WATSON: I always drew as a child, for hours endlessly…whilst my mother would make jewelry. Then during my teenage years my very close friend invited me to his studio, he gave me an easel and a De Kooning book… I gave him back the book, but the easel is still in my studio today. I am trying to transcend into something primal whilst painting, where all knowledge is placed in the background…where the painting is constructed through a weaving interplay of intuition and the awareness of the tempo and rhythms coming about from the process of painting.
It’s always about balancing a solidified wholeness, whilst keeping the battle scars of the process intact. I like work to go through huge uncertainty, to feel that sense of unease and sometimes rolling the dice right at the very end hoping a ghost might come through the layers and present something I could never possibly draw out of the work myself. Working away from the human element is crucial for me.
I’m curious about larger narratives and if you’re changing how you work as you bring different experiences into what you’re making. Are there particular ideas or references that inform your practice at present and is this something that changes?
At present, I am trying to reduce the work to a state where it feels as if it has come from an experience, but the experience isn't contained within a subject, so directly. So each work feels like a microtonality within a progression, if we were comparing it to music… I like this idea in music where the pitch falls between keys. So I am thinking of them more as accented symbols that are found throughout puncturing and scraping through the surface finding a resemblance or hum of something that oscillates between a ‘nothing’ state or a ‘fraction of an idea’. The whole body of work at the moment feels like one shifting note on an organ. They feel further away from narrative based work, which used to very much be informed by the philosophy and poetry I would be reading. Now I am very much allowing paint to be the main receiver, trusting in that as the vessel for tension.
As we were speaking prior to meeting, you mentioned wanting to discuss, “getting beyond the cult of self.” I’ve been thinking about that idea a lot and–through my lens–it brings up two ideas. The first is rather broad: can we go beyond the cult of self when we exist in capitalism and hyper-personalization? But where I’d like to start is looking at the history of modern art—so much of it was built through collectives and movements… Dada or Fluxus and we still have groups of people working under a larger umbrella, but I feel that art has become so focused on “personal brand,” rather than movements. My interpretation is that to get beyond the self, we actually need more people together, and that’s almost counterintuitive to the entire ecosystem we’re in right now.
My experience thus far as an artist is trying to exist within that ecosystem, which is beyond the art world. It’s the world, right? It’s a multifaceted dimension. I think it’s about trying to remember that the art world is over here and the world is here, but they can coexist. And also, trying to be present with what information is coming in and how the external information that’s coming in—how you’re translating that into your own practice, and whether that’s projected onto your practice to sublimate the ego or to try to actually find something through the curiosity within the practice, symbiotically with your own experience of the world.
So, take trees for example: the way they come about, where they exist geographically, how they’re rooted, their lineage as an object, and then the artist, and then them being painted by Van Gogh, and then Wendell Berry or Walden’s writing about nature and that having this whole discourse about these things we’re looking at. As a visual artist, you can’t fully get away from what has happened previously, once you have installed a cultural awareness in relation to both the natural and human built world. But I feel like it’s about attaching to the idea of your direct response in that moment in time, and capturing the energy of the thing you’re looking at, while trying to connect with getting out of the way. So the self is contained within the experience, but it’s not the forefront. The impetus is based around whatever it is you’re trying to channel energy through, rather than you being the conductor and wanting the audience to look at you, with the subject as a byproduct or subtext. I think it’s very much the text of what you’re trying to do, but it feels like in 2026 it’s very much the opposite—the subject is actually the subtext, and the individual making it is the overarching theme.
I was looking at the cave paintings in Lascaux, France, as we were talking over email. They're 17,000 to 22,000 years old. They were there to translate something that felt important.
I think we’re in an age now where people so desperately want to translate something to get recognized and it’s quite often detached from what is being made—‘it’s just going to make me get what I want and need to feel good for that moment, which is kind of the opposite of the spiritual, direct path.’
Referencing those cave paintings—if you go back to almost any ancient art, everyone is putting themselves in it, right? We have an inherent ego. If you think of Egyptian art… hieroglyphics, there’s a language, but also depictions of self. I think ego and art is the entire tension of creating. Even some of those larger figures—their egos get tempered over time as they become more frail and I think that’s the evolution of the work. When ego doesn’t evolve, I lose interest. Very generically, I’d cite Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons as examples of ego-first artists who only accelerate in scale, rather than an evolution of self.
Yes this is true , but those cave paintings depict bison, bears, bulls… and somewhat abstract symbols, lines etc. Aside from the animals involved there is only one depiction of a human figure, the bird headed man in a deep hidden chamber. There is a deep ritualistic component that Magdalenian people tapped into that feels profoundly honest, attaching to the natural worlds in a raw sensibility. But also can anything be fully void of ego? if performed by a human hand/touch? I think an effort to move away from self, is a good start.
The YBA’s elevated the “cult of self” to a whole new level. Painting was on its knees then, I think the search for truth was also...perhaps it still is.
I always come back to this Philip Guston quote “When you're in the studio painting, there are a lot of people in there with you - your teachers, friends, painters from history, critics... and one by one if you're really painting, they walk out. And if you're really painting you walk out.” He talks about something coming through you that isn’t signaled by any fabric or mold of societal expectation—what’s on brand at the time or what’s important. I see it as sincerely nebulous.
With Guston, I feel that there’s a point in his work where it’s a balance of material and self—it has that childlike creation feel, but you can’t have that without the perspective of being an adult and putting the self in there. It’s something many notable artists employ—combining skill with intuition and experience, even if it’s subconscious. That’s another point of magic and tension. Conversely, if you’re using very high-end fabrications (to make art) that you’re never actually touching, you’re not at war with the canvas or the paint.
Exactly, you’re in a conversation with yourself in that case. When I was originally getting into Painting, it was Muller, glass, bags of Prussian blue, cadmiums—quite toxic stuff—and linseed. Making mediums, grinding pigment, and understanding what’s in it and where it came from—its heritage. Sometimes You’re painting with earth pigments like raw umber which is mined directly from open pits. It makes you feel very close to the material when you gain an understanding of its origin.
If you thicken this paint it becomes sculptural, if you thin it you get transparency—it’s like a living, breathing thing and it’s very much beyond any ‘ideas’. Some people want to feel closer to the materials than other’s…for me it’s important.
In the hyper-information age I know more about you before I even see your work, right? We go into art backwards. There were so many works I saw when I was young where I didn’t even know what the person who created it looked like and it didn’t matter to me—that’s actually when the exploration starts, when you’re curious about the person. Now we know more about the person before we see the work: I know their upbringing, I know where they went to school, I know their wealth, I know their lineage, I know what they post on social media, I know where they lean on the political spectrum. So now the work’s almost spoiled, because I’m coming in with too much information. I don’t think that can be changed, but I do think the table has completely turned in how we consume artwork and no one really noticed.
Yeah, it’s backwards. And with the cave paintings, with the ones at Lascaux, I don’t know who made those and I never will. But what’s important is that I see, I feel what’s going on there….prehistoric Homo sapiens.
As a contemporary painter do you think about that dynamic—of how much information you’re putting out there before people look at your work and how much you’re revealing at all? Because you’re writing quite a bit as well, often posting dense text on Instagram. Can you talk about that connection?
Those texts I was posting were very much observations of my experiences with the world that were slightly detached from my paintings. It allowed the painting to be left in the studio and kind of sacred, and then using social media to kind of mess with things a bit. Some of the texts I put out are quite dense and intellectual, but also, I put out something a while ago that was just two lines—dark humor, almost like a David Lynch thought process—not to compare myself to David Lynch, but that kind of thing.
I know they all exist within this same world as the painting—the ideas come from me—but I think I’m so fed up with social media that I don’t want to try to put up a painting that’s 140cm by 160cm, that’s six months of work, eight layers of paint.
However, all these things feed into that same intersection of how we’re existing. Not super analytically—always kind of rapturous and poetic—if you’ve read any of it, it’s kind of existential.
Oh, absolutely.
Constantly firing on that kind of existential notion of curiosity. I’m at the point where social media is lacking in interest for me.
I am reading Angst by Hélène Cixous—you won't find that depth in any socials.
I think it’s one of the greatest travesties—how much art people see and how little they’ve actually seen it, because they’ve never been six feet away from it. The reason I bring up text is that when I look at your work, I can’t help but have your writing in the back of my mind. It frames the paintings as flickers of observation. Whether that was right or wrong, it added depth. And, again, once we put it out there we can’t control it, right? All we can do is start to obscure more.
I like to see them as obscured signposts and signals. I want to basically get to the point where they are the residue of the original thought. I want them to be the residue of the thought, but I also don’t really want you to know the thought. I was speaking to my friend today, who’s a painter—Johnny Abrahams—about how there’s a lot of “exclamation mark”: a person in their studio, painting a resolved scene, a horse, a dog, a nude, and so on. I really want my paintings to be far away from an exclamation mark and far closer to a question mark.
I think it’s very uncomfortable for people to look at a question mark. The idea of sitting with something that could actually turn on you is unsettling to some, but that’s my favorite type of art.
Me too. Some kind of scribbly Twombly drawing or something—people just race past it.
That’s really interesting, because I think one of the easiest examples of a feedback loop breaking would be abstraction, right? I think abstraction is actually one of the most incredible human inventions that doesn’t get talked about.
I think it’s one of the only places that exists with very little to any rules. The only rules in abstraction are ones that have been developed through movements and even those movements are as real or as artificial as you want to make them. Because we look at art history, but from what perspective, and who’s right and who’s wrong, and if even pure abstraction exists, because I wonder about that too. If a scribble still derives from, say, the bird you saw on a walk, but you haven’t realized it yet.
For me personally it’s Monet’s Les Nymphéas at the L’orangerie that changed the game forever. That broke and bridged.
I agree with you, because I started getting into readings about free will, questioning if it exists, and the correlation would be that I’m not sure if abstraction exists. As you said, there’s so much imprinted in our DNA that we don’t even understand. I think the opportunity in communicating through written and visual mediums is that there’s always a moment to break through—I don’t want to say convention, just perception. I think we’ve been suffocated to the point of feeling like that’s not possible anymore, and I think the only way to do it is what you said: building your own language over time.
Part of what stifles creativity is that everyone wants perfection—everyone wants “optimization.” I don’t want things optimized—I want them messy, I want friction, I want tension, because tension is the only way to get to those breakthroughs. You couldn’t have abstraction without tension—the tension of showing what’s real to you without realism.
That’s the thing—it’s about getting that balance of chaos and order. That’s kind of what a lot of my work is about: ordering something through the fundamental layering of paint, but in the process of that, destroying it constantly, and then rendering these harmonies and moments in time that lead out to depict their own chaos and then their own order. And then you find that the ones that feel successful are the ones that rendered themselves through that chaos and order—it was just me, at the hand of the painter, doing something.
Philosophically, The Birth of Tragedy—Nietzsche’s texts, Dionysus and Apollo—and (Arthur) Schopenhauer—and all these philosophers I got into years ago really shaped my thinking about what’s going on when I’m doing this. I feel like in order to get the results, you don’t fully understand what you want, but you kind of know what you don’t want.
And that’s exactly it—I don’t think you know what the hell you want as an abstract painter a lot of the time, but you know when it’s wrong, you know when it’s underworked, you know when it’s overworked, and you know when it’s at the sweet spot.
This gets into something that’s a large part of formal training: the why? I believe that an overemphasis on “why you’re making the work” or an overwritten mission can stifle intuition. Sometimes it’s important to go where the mind goes, then refine that idea with skill.
Where I went to study, in London, at the Slade— It felt very much that the emphasis was placed less on reskill or deskill but on a sense of self led direction, although historically it was much more traditional, it felt like you had a great opportunity to nurture your visual language and figure out the unique nuances of the work your trying to develop as an artist. It was a good place to be.
In the past I’ve helped run painting courses as an assistant in the past, and the amount of people who come in trying to paint in a specific way or something, but are terrified of making a mistake. It’s the opposite of that DIY thing you were talking about, that ’80s kind of thing, like Richard Hell or early Nick Cave in The Birthday Party, where it’s kind of, “We’re just going to fucking do something here, it can go horribly wrong.” I think a lot of people miss that. They think, “Well, if I miss, that’s it.” But maybe a miss is just your language and it’s a miss to you because you’re hyper-focused on yourself.
And to your point, many of those 70s and 80s musicians were very well trained before they went outside the box. I think Eno would be a good example—how much Brian Eno did before he became a pioneer of ambient music. There’s ambience in Roxy Music—it’s just not at the front. He’d been developing a language in his music and recording. Then he abandoned “rock music” and maybe there’s just not an incentive to do that anymore.
I think it’s: are you interested in fame or in deeper enquiry and search? Are you wanting to pull up big heavy rocks and see what’s underneath or do you just want your face imprinted on top of the rock, with everyone saying, “This is a great rock”?
Are you cool with lifting rocks for the rest of your career?
I don’t know if I actually have a choice, which is the blessing and the curse of it. I feel like if a painting feels somewhat honest, it’s successful. “Good” and “bad” seem like pointless words at this point. I think they’ve kind of always felt like that.
Also….. fuck what is trending just be you.