Barkwork Print

William Watkin, an Oxford/London-based abstract painter, was born in 1970 in Stoke-on-Trent in the North of England. He began painting in his late forties and only began to exhibit and sell his work in the spring of 2023. He is entirely self-taught. William is a well-known philosopher and theorist, and his painting practice carries on some of his innovative ideas around abstraction and perception in a more material, intuitive fashion. William’s work is dominated by bright colours, thick textural paint, intricate process, and abstract forms. 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. Yet, most of all, they are joyful, detailed, tactile, surprising, multi-hued explosions of paint, kept in check with the strict forms of stripes, crosshatches, lozenges, squares, diagonals, and the occasional circle. “My art reflects the two sides of my personality,” he says. “The logical side, stripes, process, panning, and the spontaneous side, expressiveness, gesture, freedom. That’s why I call my process crosshatch expressionism”. William has been painting for just over half a decade and his work only came to market in May 2023. Since then there has been great demand for his paintings, especially after his first solo show in May 2024 “Scrapes & Stripes” in the new art space “The Old Piggery” (Oxfordshire). During those first 12 months William sold over 300 pieces from tiny, but gorgeous, works on paper, to the new, large-scale crosshatch works which are selling globally as fast as he can make them. His work is already collected internationally in America, and Germany in particular, and is part of the private collection of several notable writers, thinkers and creative practitioners in the UK. People have been particularly fascinated with William’s innovative crosshatch expressionism process. Using scraping techniques, he learnt from watching videos of Gerhard Richter, he uses large paddles to add layers of stripes of paint in various thicknesses and in different directions. Then he uses notched paddles and other tools to scrape off, or cut, stripes of paint to reveal layers below.