Description
Ricky Watts
“Depth Perception”
Year: 2019
Artist’s Website: https://watts.art/pages/about-ricky-watts
b 1980 in San Francisco, California.
Richard Watts’ obsession with art began at an early age. As a child, he loved comics, especially doodling his own. Most often involving glorious battles between the U.S. Army and nuclear dinosaurs. In school, he drew his peers’ names in exchange for bartered items. By high school, his entrepreneurial efforts were funding his daily lunches. High school was also when Watts discovered the underground world of graffiti art. Fascinated with spray paint as a medium, he became fully engaged in creating elaborate pieces under the cover of night. After graduation, he traveled up and down the west coast, painting large-scale pieces on every surface he could find.
In 2000, interested in expanding his skill set, Watts enrolled at the Advertising Arts College in San Diego with an emphasis in graphic design. Unsatisfied, he left after two years and returned home to the bay area to pursue more fine art ventures. In 2004, his debut solo show “Spontaneous Combustion” opened in Petaluma, California. He flirted with multiple painting styles for a number of years before developing his current abstract style of colors and movement. This came about in 2012, as a deconstruction of the letter shapes he was producing on canvas at the time. It was a lightbulb moment for Ricky and he put everything else on hold to follow the path of this new-formed style.
