William Watkin

William Watkin is an Oxford/London-based abstract painter whose work explores rhythm, structure, and optical interference through densely layered systems of colour and paint. Using custom-built scraping tools and repeated processes of layering, removal, and disruption, he creates tactile surfaces composed of concentric forms, fractured stripes, and shifting chromatic bands.

Balancing geometric order with improvisation, Watkin’s paintings generate unstable visual fields that appear to vibrate, pulse, and reorganise as the viewer moves around them. Their surfaces reveal intricate textures, exposed underlayers, and material traces that emphasise both construction and erosion.

Influenced by modernist abstraction, woven textiles, architectural systems, printmaking, and signal patterns, his work approaches painting as both a physical object and a perceptual experience. Rather than fixed compositions, the paintings operate as evolving visual structures in which colour, rhythm, and surface continuously interact.

Born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1970, Watkin is a self-taught painter whose works are held in private collections across the UK, Europe, and the United States.

I have degrees from the universities of Manchester, Sussex and Queens University Belfast.

I have been professor of Contemporary Philosophy and Literature at Brunel University in West London for two decades. I have no formal artistic training.
Although I have no formal art training I have been working on contemporary aesthetic theory my entire adult life. I have also been associated with contemporary British art since befriending some of the YBAs in the late eighties and early nineties.

Featured in Saatchi Collection 2023

Solo show "Scrapes and Stripes" at The Old Piggery, as part of Oxfordshire Art Weeks May 2024