Shoreditch, Friday, 5.55pm Painting

William Watkin is a continental philosopher and theorist exploring his ideas on abstraction and indifference in paint. His canvases are intense and dynamic explorations of colour, gesture, surface, and texture through the use of stripes. His work is concerned with materiality, process, and thinking abstraction through geometric grids and complex colour combinations. William is a late-blooming, emergent artist whose works have only very recently come to market (May 2023), and have already been purchased by several notable writers, intellectuals and film makers. Inspired by Richter’s work Watkin uses various paddles and tools to create highly textured and rhythmically abraded surfaces onto which multiple, thick layers of paint are added over time and then removed repeatedly until the image is formed. The final pieces are astonishingly rich in intensity of colour, detail and are very tactile. There is a lot going on across the surface, but from a distance they attain a beauty and harmony that is absorbing and immersive. The inspiration of Turner, Monet, Rothko, Pollock and Richter is clear. But Watkin is also influenced by grids, crosshatching and weaving. His work shows signs of Durer, Mondrian, brutalist architecture, Polish kilims, tartan kilts, basketry, data systems and DNA. If you are interested in any of his pieces, he welcomes interaction with potential collectors. Email him with literally any questions on: william.watkin@gmail.com Born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1970 William Watkin was an accomplished and obsessive drawer as a child but was encouraged to drop art at school, and concentrate on other more academic subjects by teachers and family. In a way this turned out for the best as Professor William Watkin is now one of the world's leading continental philosophers teaching at the cutting edge Brunel University in West London, author of numerous celebrated books and giving talks on philosophy and aesthetics all over the world. Although Prof. Watkin stopped drawing he remained fascinated by modern art. After finishing at Manchester University he fell in with the YBAs, hanging out with them in Hoxton Square, Brick Lane, The Coach and Horses and The French House in the early nineties. He left that scene behind as he moved to Poland and then Ireland, but art remained central to his academic work as he built his university career writing about New York School aesthetics.