Corey West Watson
"Searching For Someday"
The Layered World Of Corey West Watson
by Dave Justus
“It sounds so clichéd to say that I was practically born with a brush in my hand, but it’s the truth,” says Corey West Watson. Throughout a childhood spent drawing and painting, Watson knew she wanted to be an artist. But she had little idea what such a calling would entail, or how the journey would test her to her limits.
“I thought being an artist was little more than creating pretty pictures to hang on people’s walls. I had no idea the depth of love I would experience… along with painful loss, and the struggle of having to forgive incredible violations.” Watson’s experiences from the playroom drawings of her youth to the studio paintings of today gave her, she now realizes, “the drive to take my art beyond just ‘pretty,’ and into a place where I would have to pour out my soul.”
That soul finds its expression on her canvases, in their abstract washes of color or their layers of mixed media. The processes she has developed—the “how” and “why” of her creative expression—find their genesis in her past, in a story that Watson never imagined she would be sharing with the world at large. But as interest in her artwork grows, so too does interest in the woman behind the signature, and so she has drawn back the curtain to offer a glimpse.
“There were many people who influenced me as a person,” she says, “but none more than Ben. He became my greatest love, and my deepest pain.” The two met at a young age and very quickly fell in love. It felt natural for them to talk about their “someday”—a life, a family, a home together. But that home couldn’t stand in the face of the Other Woman who “roared through my life like a tornado.” Watson watched helplessly as her relationship began to crumble. “She was a young woman without moral boundaries, who didn’t care that he was not available. He was a young man full of hormones, fear, and the belief that it was not possible to find the love of one’s life at 18.” Devastated, Watson removed herself from the situation, salvaging what pride she could and moving out of town, abandoning her happy “someday” in her wake.
“The emotional overflow I was experiencing had nowhere to go except onto my canvas,” she recalls. “It felt natural for me to release it there, since drawing and painting were part of who I was anyway.” But even as she took up her brush, she confronted a daunting realization: For the work to be real, the emotion that went into it had to be genuine. “I was a shy person,” Watson admits. “So while I needed the emotional release my art gave me, the thought of people seeing my heart and soul poured out onto a piece of paper terrified me.”
But her pain was too raw to keep bottled… so instead, she abstracted it. Within a few years, her work was practically nonobjective. “I was in love with creating abstract paintings not only for the challenge it presented, but I felt like it would give me a way to hide behind my work while secretly pouring out my heart.” The more she bled onto the canvas, though, the more people began to respond to her art, until she had almost literally painted herself into a corner. “The more abstract my work became, the more people asked questions. The more I had to talk about my work. And the more I realized that it was the story behind the art that connected them to my art, and me to them.”
That story was far from finished. A few years down the line, Watson felt her heart breaking all over again when she learned that Ben was getting married… to the Other Woman. Emotions she had buried in her work came surging to the surface, and she realized that the only way to cope with the news was to let him go, to move on with her own life. She got married as well, and though some small part of her still loved Ben and thought of him daily, she knew it was improper to dwell on those thoughts. “Marriage meant I had to keep him where he belonged in my life, which was in the past. I allowed myself a brief time to reflect on what he was to me… and again, I went to my art.”
Watson wanted to honor what Ben had meant to her, the enormous influence he had been on her life and her work, but she wasn’t quite certain how to do so. Then she remembered that she had collected an assortment of handmade papers back in college, for reasons that had never been entirely clear to her. Their purpose crystalized in an instant. “I began to tear and cut the papers,” she says, “and put them into acrylic paintings along with other material like ink, pastel, spray paint, and fabric. My thinking was that the different materials represented all the life experiences that I had had,” and that their inclusion in her art was a way to commemorate the influence not only of Ben, but of many of the people who had shaped her life’s course.
“One day, and quite by accident, I began to cover a painting I had been working on that I did not like. I found that parts of it were nice when they were allowed to just peek through.” Watson sat fixated on the painting for a week, considering what to do with it next. Over that time, it took on a much larger, more symbolic meaning for her. She thought about people as a whole, “how we all start life as a canvas ready to be filled. That canvas is built on in layer after layer, developing who we are. Each layer influences the next, some areas showing through and others we choose to cover up and make go away.”
This idea was so meaningful to her that she began to adopt the mixed media layering process for all of her paintings, creating colorful palimpsests that came alive in the present but offered glimpses of the past. “All the work I do, even though it is mostly nonobjective, is life based in the sense that the materials and the process I developed all came from life stories,” Watson says of her methods. “I never have a specific plan when I begin a painting. I rely on happy accidents, the element of surprise.” Still, she adheres to her axiom that only genuine emotion can produce genuine art: “I work toward the goal of having a good painting that is true to who I am, and let it happen as it wants to. I place a layer on the canvas without specific intention to cover it, and when it’s ready for another layer, I add it. I keep covering, adding, and covering layers until the painting has had enough ‘experiences’ to feel complete.”
Watson had developed her new art style as a way to help her process and compartmentalize her feelings for her lost love. “In a way, it allowed me to move forward, but in another, to keep him with me in a way that was not a threat to the life I chose.” But that life was not finished adding its layers; her experiences were far from complete.
“Eventually,” she explains, “both our marriages ended in divorce. With broken families and broken hearts, we found our way back to each other.” Mixed in with her joy at seeing him again, she felt herself flooded with additional, unexpected emotions. To her chagrin, Watson learned that Ben had married “because he thought he blew it with me, and nobody he asked was willing to tell him how to find me.” Hearing that he had loved and missed her during their many years apart, she felt a rush of anger: “I was hurt and jealous that he had chosen to have a life, home, and family with her. Even though I had also moved on and had a family of my own, it made me feel guilty at how upset I was that he had a family that was not part of me. Part of us.”
But there was a grander layer to be painted on top of this swirl of emotions. Eventually, Watson says, “I realized that through it all, God was answering my prayers the whole time.” Those answers had not always come easily, but there was no doubt she had received them. “I asked the Lord to make me an artist,” she explains, “not just to make me a good painter. He used Ben as an instrument in my life to create in me that which could not have existed without the intense life experiences I had.”
Her faith has given her a stability when she thought she might crumble, and she is grateful for God’s influence on her life and work. “He is the only one solid and secure enough to take our pain and carry us through it. He gives us outlets to release our pain and share our joy. He has given me life experience to make me more understanding as a wife, mom, friend, and daughter, as well as the understanding to use what I go through as a tool to become a better artist.”
At this point in her story, Watson says, “I am over-the-moon excited that it came around full circle and that Ben and I are now married. I love knowing that what we had was real enough to bring us back together after fifteen years apart. I am blessed because of the second chance we’ve been given, and I look forward to what our future holds.” Though she acknowledges that the path they walked to reach this point hasn’t always been pretty, she is certain that, through its highs and lows, “it has created a bond between us, and a drive to be successful together.”
Of her husband, Watson muses, “I can honestly say that he is the one person who gave me the gift of becoming the artist I am, more than anyone else in my life. To this day I am not sure he knows how much he blessed my life.” It’s clear that the pain of his absence was as much an influence on her art as the joy of their reunion, and the love between them that never died.
Thinking back to that youth with the brush in her hand, Watson is circumspect in her reflections. “As a child, had I known what I would go through that would make me the artist I was praying to be, I would have run as fast as I could the other way. As an adult, having lived through all I have and seeing the blessings it brought me in all areas of my life—not just as an artist—I would live it all over again.”
It may have taken years, a great deal of pain, a multitude of layers… but Corey West Watson finally reached her “someday.” And the experience has prepared her to make the most of
every day after.
Corey West Watson
http://www.coreywest.artspan.com/
