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| Sarah Watts | ||||
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Artist's Profile Sarah Watts’ pastel paintings of landscapes come from the countryside, rivers and lakes of western North Carolina and southern Virginia and from the desert and mountains of New Mexico and southern Colorado. She has studied with Bob Rohm and Camille Przewodek and her work is inspired by Edgar Payne, and Joaquin Sorolla. She lives on a farm near Pilot Mountain. Her work can be found in Winston-Salem at the Hampton Gallery and in Greensboro at Ambleside Gallery. Artist’s Statement: Painting is one of earth’s most fulfilling, right-brain enjoyments. For me, it’s an experience of exquisite freedom where the self diminishes in favor of color streams of light and shade, movements of forms and spaces, and all the atmosphere you can impart to a painting. Nature offers a bounty of these elements, each of which, every day, beg me to paint them. My favorite area is the mountain southwest between Santa Fe, New Mexico, north to the Colorado border, south toward the Chiracahua Apache reservation and west to the Acoma and Navajo nations. This is a land inhospitable to human habitation, yet inviting to generations of artists who felt its pull. It is a large landscape where the dry atmosphere exaggerates distance and where absolute quiet stops the sense of time. The pure space is extraordinary, punctuated by dramatic and seemingly timeless land forms and rivers. The clarity of the colors of earth, plants, water, and indeed, of the very air, together with the soft desert palette makes for a special light. The motionless, flat noon light or the gleaming evening color form the still point of a turning world, without human touch or sound. I’ve always known that I’d paint this land. Someday I’ll do it in moonlight. In addition to her painting career Watts is Professor of History at Wake Forest University where she teaches Global Economic History and U.S. History. Her publications include Rough Rider in the White House: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Desire, University of Chicago Press, 2003, paperback edition, 2006; “Built Languages of Class” in Roberta Moudry, ed., The American Skyscraper Culturally Reconsidered, Cambridge University Press, 2005, and Order Against Chaos: Business Culture and Labor Ideology in America, 1880- 1920, Greenwood Press, 1991.
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