James Watkins comes to his art with great sensitivity of touch that gives his works immense lyrical beauty. He throws elegant miniature cups, saucers and bowls, and imposing double-walled cauldrons and jars, some of which are close to three feet high. His works reflects his West Texas environment. The curves of the necks of the sandhill cranes and Canada geese populate the rims of his cauldrons and bird baskets. The orange color of the canyons, the bright blue of the sky, and the deep orange and brown hue of the dust storms are seen in the colors of his platters. The textures of rocks, stones and the canyon walls also appear in his platters and pots. Watkins' clarity of vision identifies him as a medium of vital spiritual force. Although he is very grounded in the physical world around him, he reflects philosophically: "I think there's inner light, I think there's an inner world, I think there's inner knowledge that art draws from. I think art comes from this Inner Light."1
Home, for Watkins, is Lubbock, Texas. The stark southwest landscape and the Panhandle canyons provide spiritual and visual stimulation that nurtures his artistic sensibility. When he first arrived in 1978, he had to get used to the environment before he could create: "I saw wild turkeys, Canada geese, and sandhill cranes on the drive from Virginia to Lubbock. I had never seen these things in my entire life."2 He began working immediately he arrived, but with great difficulty. He found the Southwest environment very different from his familiar environment. According to him, "My previous forms and colors didn't relate to this. The work didn't feel right. I stopped working and started going out hiking and looking at the land and being quiet and listening. I wanted to absorb the beautiful surrounding."3
As Watkins absorbed the spectacular beauty of the canyons and impressive arid desert land, he recalibrated his aesthetic scheme. He began to see and to collect both visual and physical materials for his work. He drew clay from the riverbed, and the colors of his terra sigillata and glazes come from the oxides and desert dust storms. He learned new ways of seeing by studying the ancient, natural pictographs in the canyons and the ritual pictographs the forebears of the Seminole had left in the caves. Watkins constructed a new aesthetic framework by critically blending textures, colors, lines, and marks. Not only did he find peace in the spectacular beauty and spiritual ambiance of the canyons. They inspired works such as Painted Desert series and Rattlesnake Canyon series. The decorative motifs of these works came straight out from the rock outcropping, the soil textures, orange and brown color hues of the rock markings, the curved necks of the wintering Canada geese and sandhill cranes of West Texas.4
Born in Louisville, Kentucky in May 28, 1951, James Curley Watkins moved to Athens, Alabama with his mother. He developed his own distinct aesthetic style by learning from his parents the importance and power of color and aesthetics. His mother believed that color influences one's emotional state and that red and orange would make one more alert and happy. So she decked out her children in brightly colored clothes. His father believed that painting a green house would ensure a good harvest, and so he painted their home a green color.5 Reflecting on his parent's views, Watkins concluded that it was inevitable that one of his six siblings would be interested in rituals and visual things.6
At Kansas City Art Institute, Watkins learned to make functional pots. From 1970 to 1973, he studied with Ken Ferguson, a well-known ceramicist, Victor Babu, Jackie Rice, and George Timock. He recalled that period as exciting and challenging. Exceptional artists and instructors and students surrounded him, and he coped with the pressures of art school by listening to jazz. In graduate school at Indiana University at Bloomington, Watkins began to question the principles he had learned from his "very influential instructors."7 He began to unlearn what he had learnt, doing everything that he had been told not to do so that his "work became more transitory, more concerned with experiences."8 That was when he began to take his dreams seriously. He had learned from his mother that dreams "weren't just dreams," and from the Senoi people of Malaysia he learned to use autosuggestion and dreams, to become conscious while dreaming and to remember his dreams.
Watkins began practicing lucid dreaming, that is, the act of becoming conscious while dreaming, solving one's life problems in dream state. He kept a journal to write down his dreams or draw them once he awoke. According to him, "a lot of [his] pot forms have come from the dreams."9 But the idea of his magnificent cauldrons comes from his early family life. Cauldrons played an important role in his childhood experiences. His mother and grandmother washed clothes and manufactured soap in large cast-iron pots. "They would, at certain times of the year, boil the clothes and the bedding because they felt it was sanitary and healthy. They also made hominy, hogs-head cheese, cracklings, and lye soap in the big pot."10 In choosing to build large pots, Watkins chose to reaffirm the values of his early life. He began to builds large-scale jars that have been described as "fit for a race of giants."11
The technique for constructing a double-walled cauldron came to him in a dream, enabling Watkins to overcome the structural limitations he encountered as he tried to create pots that were twenty-four inches wide. The single-walled pots would always warp in the kiln. "One night, I dreamed that I was in Santa Fe, and I was walking into the plaza and I looked through the window of a gallery, I saw my pots, but they were double-walled."12 Still in dream state, Watkins examined the pots to understand how they were made. In his mind's eye he "saw" how to create the double-walls of large volumetric sixty pounds cauldrons. First, twenty-eight pound clay is thrown on a wheel and a single-walled pot is pulled to a certain height, and then allowed to stiffen. Next, an inner pot is formed from a large coil of clay centered at the base of the first pot. Using this ancient coil technique, the wall of the inner pot is pulled higher than the wall of the outer pot. Once the clay stiffens, the lip of the inner pot is curved backwards to meet the rim of the outer pot. The sealing of the rim creates a hollowed out space between the two walls. This is what gives the pot the solidity and strength to withstand warping in the kiln.
On waking up, Watkins experimented with the physical possibility and plasticity of clay with patience and precision. He teased and pulled and created his first double-walled pot. The interior space hidden between the double walls evokes powerful imageries. Watkins sees it as exemplifying "stored energy, mystery, and a symbol of the vessel as a contained container." It radiates strength, stability, and sensuality. It is also reminiscent of maternal strength and fertility, appearing stout, voluminous, and voluptuous. As he mastery developed, Watkins introduced architectural forms to these massive cauldrons, bending and shaping them into forms that are evocative of his Southwest landscape-these include the stylized heads of birds, antelopes' horns, and snakes.13
Walks by the Ilano river and trips to contemplate the monumental scale and soaring walls of the canyons provides a unique environment for meditation. to see This enables Watkins to clear his mind and to approach his work with clarity of vision. He continually searches for balance between texture, color and form, and between mythic scale and beauty, he explores fully the aesthetic relationship of formal balance and harmony. He thinks of sound as he does so. He tries to figure what sound creation would make if one could hear that sound. The whir of the spinning wheel? The sound of jazz? Watkins mentally listens to jazz as he throws his pots and platters: "I like to listen to jazz. I think of music when I work. The intervals of highs and lows, short and long sounds, slow and fast movements, up and down inspire creation."14 He thinks of his pots as sound made visual. "[They] are rhythm, balance and movement,"15 he declared.
The sound and vibration of the spinning wheel evokes the high and low interval of the internal jazz beat that forms Watkins sonic pots. Sound energizes his surroundings. "I am actually making sounds in my head that connects with the pots and the marks I make."16 As the music plays, Watkins pulls memories from his inner world to thread the world. He sees each piece of work as comprised of preserved memories from both a personal and a borrowed history.17 With skill and sensitivity, he produces his massive sixty-pound double-walled pots and twenty-eight pound platters. Random drawings, markings, coatings of slip or crushed and sieved materials, rubbed into the surface are then sprinkled on them before they are fired to Cone 10 in reduction. In expressing the interconnectedness of life, each cauldron and platter stand as artifacts of the artist's personal reality.
1. Personal communication July 26, 1993.
2. Watkins, quoted in Kippra D. Hopper 1999, 25.
3. Ibid., 13.
4. Personal communication 1993.
5. Personal communication 1993.
6. Quoted in Hopper 1999, 5.
7. Quoted in Hopper 11.
8. Ibid., 11.
9. Ibid., 11-12.
10. Quoted in Hopper, 6.
11. Janet Tyson, February 25, 1990.
12. Quoted in Hopper, 51.
13. Quoted in Hopper 1999, 30.
14. Personal communication 1993.
15. Personal communication 1993.
16. Personal communication 1993.
17. Quoted in Hopper 1999, 31.
Nzegwu, Nkiru. "Living in a Glass House, Passing Through Glass: The Art of Therman Statom, James Watkins, and John Dowell Jr." International Review of African American Art, 11, 2, 1994: 45-51.
---------. "James Watkins." In Uncommon Beauty in Common Objects: The Legacy of African American Craft Art, National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center, Wilberforce, Ohio, 1993, 102.
Tyson, Janet. "Four Artists Plus 1 Show Feats of Clay." Fort Worth
Star-Telegram (February 25, 1990.
Copyright 2003 Africa Resource Center