If his destiny be strange, it is also sublime.
—Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
You read about it—how, as he grew older, the 16th-century Venetian painter Titian increasingly abandoned the mimetic precision of his earlier works in favour of a more impressionistic and visceral style. Reproductions can hint at his bravura application—how, with his brush, he created clumps and ribbons of paint to catch the light; how, smearing with his fingers, he produced gradations of pigment of superb complexity. But it’s quite another thing to encounter a late Titian directly. To do so is to immediately understand the artist’s genius in transforming the image into a site of sensual experience. Words and illustrations are at once vindicated and rendered quite inadequate.
This situation gives me pause as I attempt to make sense of the recent paintings of Denys Watkins. Over the past 15 or so years, Watkins’ work has been growing in sensuousness and expressivity, informed by the expertise accumulated by the artist over his long career. More and more he’s luxuriated in the diverse possibilities of paint: applying velvety blocks of pigment to smooth, clay-coated boards; pouring slippery skins of translucent colour over grainy canvases. The illustrations in this book point to the splendour of Watkins’ works, but these cannot be fully appreciated unless they are seen in the real. The objects matter, or, more accurately, encountering them matters. …
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Full essay in Dynamo Hum: Denys Watkins: Selected Paintings 2004–2016 (Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland: Rim Books and Bath Street Arts Trust, 2017), published to accompany an exhibition of the same name originally held at the Gus Fisher Gallery.
Dynamo Hum
Denys Watkins
17 November to 15 December 2017
Gus Fisher Gallery, University of Auckland
Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
3 August to 16 September 2018
Toi Moroki Centre of Contemporary Art (CoCA)
Ōtautahi Christchurch
18 May to 25 August 2019
Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua
Whanganui
