Greta Watson's work is lovely in it's use of colors and textures and form. But her current show contains so many images that are startling and haunting that it's within a deeper context that we have to look at the work. Reflecting her own experiences of living through the protests of the Viet Nam War and her recent job working as an on camera Sketch Artist for the Aaron Sorkin film "The Trial of the Chicago 7" the pieces were created from images from that time and her own imagination, a combination of factual news and media based photographs and stories, including some that were recreated in the film, her travels to Viet Nam and her life lived during that extraordinarily powerful time in history.
I met Greta through my friend the Gallerist Paul Calendrillo who I have written about in these pages before. Because of the current health crisis, Paul had decided at first to postpone and then to cancel all of his New York shows until at least 2021. Paul contacted me one day and asked if I would be interested in speaking with Greta as he knew from our conversations over these past months that I have continued to work with Artists in whatever ways that I can, earlier on creating online forums and Artist talks through Zoom calls that were then recorded and transferred to YouTube, and when possible as the world began to open up again to bring collectors to Artist's studios to view work as we maintained all the health and safety protocols. It's been such a difficult time for many Artists, not only to show their work but also in some cases to feel the impetus to create. In many ways I feel that the greatest service I have been able to do for the Artists I know and love is to encourage them to do the work they love to do.
When Paul first contacted me I looked Greta up online, doing my research as I always do to see more of what her work was about. The first pieces I saw were very beautiful in a very positive and color-filled life giving way, and so when I began to look at the pieces in her current show I was surprised by the vast difference in not only style but feel of them. The pieces she created for "The Spirits of Peace" are difficult to view sometimes because of the painful subject matter and dark history surrounding them, but they are important pieces because the Artist is not afraid to show the stark reality that inspired them. They tell a story that needs to be told and retold, especially in the world we are living in now when so many of the youth and younger generations do not know it. As I wrote a few months ago when I acted in a live on Zoom version of the play "Days of Possibilities" by Rich Orloff, my own history has overlapped with areas of the Viet Nam War and the protests around it. Though I am much younger than those who were an integral part of the youth of that time, I have older brothers who felt almost light years away from me in age, and one in particular who went to Berkeley in the late 60's whose life was forever changed by his experiences of what it meant to be a thinking and caring teenager facing danger because of his belief in truth and justice, freedom and civil and humanitarian rights.
"The Spirits of Peace" will run at it's current location at 75 Greene Street in Soho through October 28, and it is my hope that I will be able to help Greta find more outlets to tell both the story of this historical time and her own and to show the powerful images she has created that describe a country and a people, a war and the individuals and societal systems involved. This is work that is complex and full of depth of meaning, with each piece sharing a lesson from history that if we are brave enough to view and to heed it will help us learn from the past.
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