Gail Watson Found Art Again

New Anderson Artists Guild member Gail Watson attended art school as a young adult but then stopped. “It didn’t last long,” she said. “I dropped out and didn’t pick up art again until I was almost 30.”

During the intervening years, she married and worked mainly at spas teaching aerobics and helping people work out on strength equipment. Today she is retired.

Since 1982, she’s lived in Toccoa, Georgia, her husband’s hometown. He signed her up for an art class as a Christmas gift, and she’s never looked back. Her favorite medium is watercolor. “I like the way it feels and all the things you can do,” she said. “I do a lot of different techniques.” These include using hot wax as a resist for batiks on rice paper. “At the end, I iron it all between newspaper,” she said.

Another technique is to pour with three separate colors that are each thinly mixed. “I put the paint in cups and let it mingle on wet paper,” she said. “Once it dries, I use liquid masking to preserve the lightest values. I can pour for a whole week. It gets darker and darker.”

Her subjects come from the outdoors, especially on hiking trips ranging from glaciers to mountains, from Ireland to Italy to Yellowstone National Park. She takes a lot of photos on her travels and sometimes blends them for the perfect perspective.

She belongs to six different watercolor organizations as a signature member, from Georgia to California. “It took a while,” she said. She also belongs to the North Georgia Arts Guild and has sold her artwork in Clayton.

She lives out in the country on a small private pond, where she paints in the sunroom. I can walk in there any time,” she said. “Everything is set up for me.

For more information about Watson, visit www.gails-art.blogspot.com.

Gail Watson