Big Sky Mind: A Profile of the Art and Spiritual Practice of Joan Watts
By Kim Chishin Russo

When Joan Watts moved to Santa Fe from New York in 1986, the landscape of New Mexico became the influence critics and curators referenced when discussing her paintings. But there is something more complex in Watts’ work.
    Beginning in the mid-1990s, the artist completed a series of paintings with titles such as Yantra, Zazen, and Zero that directly implied Hindu or Buddhist content.
    Many writers have noted the spiritual qualities in Watts’ paintings, using words like “ephemeral” to describe the luminosity of the paint or “meditative” to describe her subtle formal choices—all outcomes, they suggest, of her examination of the landscape. 
    I wonder if, instead, the light and space of New Mexico gave Watts, a dedicated Zen practitioner, the chance to relate the spiritual experiences she had on the meditation cushion through her art.
    But how do you make a physical object that directly expresses a spiritual or meditative experience?
    I arrive at Joan Watt’s home and studio on a gloriously sunny Memorial Day. She leads me into her impressive studio where her newest paintings, in cool gradations of blue, purple, and gray, line the warm, white walls. Paintings that span nearly 40 years of work, some on circular canvases, are neatly stored in racks on one wall of the studio.
    Watts’ paintings use reductive forms, but all of her work references emotional and spiritual experience.
    “Everything is waves,” Watts explains, “sound, light, water, energy. And there are waves during meditation—waves of thought. The transient and luminous light of New Mexico has certainly been a penetrating ‘vehicle’ enveloping my spiritual path, but it is also true that my spiritual path propels me to somehow discover the means to evoke light and space through painting.” 
    After beginning her meditation practice in 1989, the process of making a painting also became a form of meditation for Watts. 
    “Now when I begin a painting, I have only a vague feeling about where to go,” she says. “The painting takes over, and I disappear. The process is no longer ego-bound. But the moment before the ego drops is pure fear. I know I am losing it—losing my ego as my base. It is the same experience in sitting meditation, when the ego drops away. When I am working, it is completely intuitive, and there is the intellectual aspect afterwards. Only later can I reflect—who painted that? While I am painting, there is no ‘me,’ no extra thought, no judgment.”
    Watts’ work has a quality of reaching everywhere without being attached to the forms of the physical world. So when someone asks her what the paintings are about or what she means by them, the question is not easily answered, especially if the inquirer expects a response that relates to the world of objects and associations. 
    That might be why one viewer of her works at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe left the angry indentation of his fist in one canvas. The ego demands something, anything, to attach itself to. But in Watts’ paintings, there is no-thing.
    I saw nothing in Rothko’s paintings, I admit to Watts, until I visited the Rothko Chapel in Houston for the first time. When I entered the chapel and saw the huge black canvases, I didn’t understand why anyone would present black paintings of nothing to describe spirituality. Why black? Why no religious images or symbols? I sat there for a long time repeating those questions to myself and really looking at the work. Then I saw it: the paintings weren’t black—they were purple and many other subtle colors—and they slowly revealed themselves to me. Rothko had created an experience for me rather than showing me a picture. I walked in angry with Rothko and walked out in awe.
    “I visited that chapel several times after my mastectomy,” Watts says, “and also had a powerful experience with the work. Seeing the Rothko Chapel was healing for me, and it was the beginning of my meditation practice, although I didn’t know it at the time.”
    This kind of discovery happens when viewers of art allow themselves to sit, to ask questions, and to allow questions. The work can then reveal itself. This kind of discovery can happen if one spends time with Watts’ work rather than looking at it briefly.
    In Not Always So, a collection of lectures by Shunryu Suzuki, the Zen teacher writes, “To exist in big mind is an act of faith, which is different from the usual faith of believing in a particular idea or being. It is to believe that something is supporting us and supporting all our activities including thinking mind and emotional feelings. All these things are supported by something big that has no form or color. It is impossible to know what it is, but something exists there, something that is neither material nor spiritual. Something like that always exists, and we exist in that space.”
    Watts shows us how the inner landscape and the outer landscape are one and the same—one big space—and we exist in that space.

[This excerpt from "Big Sky Mind" is reprinted here courtesy of the Santa Fe New Mexican. The images of Joan Watts' art on this page are (top) "One-2" and (bottom) "One-6," both oil on canvas, 24 x 24 inches, 2008. Visit http://kimrusso.net/ to learn about Kim Chishin Russo's art and work.]