About Carol A. Watson
"It is never too late to be what you might have been."
George Eliot

Carol has always loved horses, feathers, sunshine and the natural world. It wasn't until she was into her mid-40's, however, that she discovered an artistic talent for expressing the passion she felt for those things. Self taught, she reads art books and experiments with different techniques to express the essence of the subjects she loves. Carol's favorite mediums are watercolor, acrylic and occasionally pencil. The uncertain nature of using a more wet-in-wet watercolor technique makes her art more interesting by letting the pools of color add texture and visual spice. More recently she has expanded her style, using the technique of collaging by painting papers, cutting out shapes and adhering them to canvas to create evocative equine portraits.

Her art, for the most part, is stylized. Carol tries to capture the spirit or essence of the subject instead of trying to be realistic or detailed in her portrayals. For Carol, less is, indeed more. Warm earth tones are the predominant colors she uses because they warm the spirit. At the Mystic Art Association's Member Show in 2002 she won an Honorable Mention for her first piece ever entered in a show. Her art has also been on display at Studio 33 in New London, CT; The Norwich Arts Council Gallery in Norwich, CT; Meiklem Kiln Works Gallery in Bozrah, CT and seen in Horses in Art Magazine. Carol has donated art to Thoroughbred Charities of America in Lexington, KY and Mitchell Farm Equine Retirement in Salem, CT for their fund raising silent auctions.

Working in the naval nuclear industry for 18 years Carol was a manufacturing engineer when she left. Since 1992 she's worked with her husband, Steve, in their street rod and custom car parts business. Although she lives in Bozrah, Connecticut, Carol has intangible roots in the Southwest and Rocky Mountains of Colorado, often visiting those locales with Steve to drink in the subtle beauty of the arid Southwest and majestic and humbling power of the Rockies. Frank Howell, Sarah Rogers, Carrie Fell and William Matthews are artists whose work Carol admires and is especially drawn to because of their subject matter and simplistic yet evocative style. Some of their influence is evident in her art. Being able to express the subjects she is passionate about is a cherished ability. A published writer, Carol also expresses her passion through her writings.

Since 2005 Carol has been a dedicated volunteer at an equine retirement farm. This is the fulfillment of a dream. Although never having owned a horse or really ridden, Carol's undying passion since childhood for the grace, beauty and strength of equines is fulfilled at Mitchell Farm Equine Retirement, Inc. located in Salem, Connecticut. There she mucks stalls, throws bales of hay, leads horses to pasture, grooms them, empties and fills water buckets ... whatever needs to be done. The work is hard yet immensely fulfilling and satisfying and benefits the horses as well as Carol's spirit. The horses retired there are either old or infirm and no longer ridden. They are allowed to graze in ample pastures during the day while getting expert care to enable them to live out their final years in peace in a caring setting with no more human demands. Mitchell Farm Equine Retirement saves the horses from what could have become a less than desirable end.

Please visit Mitchell Farm's web site. As a non-profit organization, they rely on donations, and fund raising events to raise the monies needed to maintain the on-going expense of caring for the 24 horses presently retired there. To that end, 10% of all sales from this website are donated to Mitchell Farm. You can read all of Carol's Horse of the Month columns, which she writes for a local newspaper featuring the retirees, at www.mitchellfarm.org.

About Steve Watson

Steve is a design and manufacturing engineer with two degrees in Engineering. However, art has always been a significant interest in his life.

Grade school art classes introduced a means of visual communication that could be quite powerful and fun. One construction paper rendition of the word "Fire" got school wide recognition. And an underlying desire to commercialize soon developed. By fourth grade, Steve had started to make and sell small painted plaster pins. Fellow students would wait for him at one corner of the school yard to see what new items he had made.

Boring junior high and high school classes gave practice time for pencil sketching, typically of hot rods and monsters. He devoured catalogs from Big Daddy Roth, The Mouse and other tee-shirt artists of the early 60's. Equipped with his own airbrush, Steve started selling personalized monster tee's to classmates and painted advertising truck sign boards for a neighbor businessman...including the man's portrait.

College left much less time for doodling in class. But as soon as he could start choosing electives, art was at the top of the list. Steve started doing art at night. This time, acrylics were the medium of choice, and he soon had friends asking him to do a piece for them. He copied album covers and experimented with various visual styles, even did the logos for two college musical groups.

As an adult, Steve has often experimented with art in various forms such as wood carving, furniture making, and pen and ink drawings. But only recently has he returned to his two favorite media, pencil and acrylics, to focus on these two means of expression - appropriate for a Gemini. His work tries to present detail as he sees it, with the hope of evoking emotion in the viewer. 

The monochromatic nature of graphite pencils presents a particular challenge which Steve approaches by focusing on textures and by coaxing three dimensionality from a flat piece of paper. His favorite subjects are people, particularly beautiful women. "Why draw subjects that you don't like yourself?", he has said. "I want to be involved personally with my art. Otherwise, what fun is it?" This same feeling carries over to his landscapes of Arizona Deserts and Colorado Rockies.

"Since the pencil is monochromatic, the acrylics give me a means of expressing colors." That same focus on textures led him to explore the softness of acrylic watercolors to render skin and fabric and hair, and again to evoke three dimensionality.