Cream Head Study
Since completing her studies at Glasgow School of Art in 1988 Watt has exhibited extensively around the UK. In 1987 she was the winner of the renowned John Player Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery. Much of her work is penetrating self portraiture, executed in a controlled and technically precise manner which echoes the techniques of the Renaissance Masters, and later, artists like Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) and Lucian Freud (b.1922). Her palette is pale and subtle, creating in her frequent nude studies a luminous flesh quality which she often contrasts with crisply painted drapery, following a classical tradition. Cream Head Study is one of a group of closely observed and cropped 'body parts', in which she explores heads, arms, hands and sections of the human torso, both male and female. It is a self portrait and shows well the vulnerable, haunting and yet lyrical quality she achieves in the faces of her subjects. Its intimate scale contrasts with her other work, much of which is monumental in size.
