Christopher Watson is an American painter and software engineer whose large-format work explores history, movement, memory, and the emotional life of the road. His current fifty-painting series, The Golden Age of Cycling, draws on a lifetime of endurance sport and a fascination with the visual world of 1890 to 1930.
We have 20 questions for Christopher about the art world and his journey into it:
Hotel de Ville, 48 x 60 inches, oil on canvas
1. How would you describe your art?
Historical narrative realism with an impressionist soul. Every painting has a story to tell, and for me the story and the feeling behind a piece matter more than a perfectly rendered image. Much of my current work begins with historic references – often glass negatives and photographs from the turn of the twentieth century. I spend almost as much time researching as I do painting, wondering what was happening when the shutter closed and what existed just outside the frame.
On the canvas, I like to paint messy: thick paint, visible brushwork, and plenty of texture. I am not trying to reproduce a photograph. I am trying to reconstruct the experience of a moment. I work large, increasingly close to life-size, because scale lets the viewer feel as if they could step into the scene. The story is rarely obvious at first glance, but its threads begin to connect the longer you look.
2. Where are you based, and does your location have any influence on your art?
I live in Peterborough, New Hampshire, a small town in the southern part of the state with an extraordinary amount of artistic energy. I am near MacDowell, the artist colony, so creative people from around the world come here to step away from their usual lives and work in the woods. I will see residents heading between their studios and the main hall, sometimes offer them a ride, and get to hear about projects taking shape in every imaginable discipline.
The quiet of the woods gives me room to contemplate ideas, and that space has become essential to who I am as an artist. I love to travel, and every so often I need to head into a city and touch concrete, but Peterborough has a long history of welcoming creative work. It is home.
Luna, 40 x 60 inches, oil on canvas
3. Did you know you wanted to be an artist as a child, and did you go to art school? If not, how did your art path develop?
I have been making things for as long as I can remember. As a child, I loved science fairs less for the science than for the excuse to build something enormous. I once made a flight simulator from a refrigerator box, complete with cardboard instruments, linked control yokes, and scenery moving on a paper conveyor. In sixth grade I built a functional twelve-story elevator with motors, wiring, buttons, and an LED floor display. The idea that you can imagine something and then make it exist still amazes me.
I grew up with a simple philosophy: use what is in front of you. Do not wait for perfect materials or ideal circumstances. My father was an architect, so something was always being designed or built in our house, and I sketched constantly as a way to move ideas from my head onto paper.
Photography was my first sustained visual practice. My high school had a darkroom and a teacher who cared deeply about the arts, so I learned to shoot on a Pentax, develop film, and make my own prints. I later attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for several semesters and took graphic design courses at the University of Alaska Anchorage. In 1992, my collage was selected unanimously from approximately 20,000 entries in Silicon Graphics Get Indy contest. I eventually left school in Alaska to start my first company. I loved learning, but I was even more excited by doing.
The Conductor, Acrylic on canvas | 20 1/8 x 30 1/4 in
My first serious attempt at painting was The Conductor in 2013, based on a photograph I took of my father and young daughter at the back of a rail car. From that point forward, I always had a painting on the easel, even when I was not working every day. Daily painting became a committed practice in mid-2025. I began as a perfectionist, and it hindered everything. Over time I stopped chasing photorealism and learned to trust the story, the brushwork, and, above all, the feeling.
4. Did anyone else greatly influence your art – for example, a relative, another artist, a particular art era or movement, or a muse?
My father was an architect and my mother was a public school teacher. The philosophy in our house was straightforward: if you want something, learn how to make it. That shaped everything.
My influences cross disciplines. Ansel Adams showed me the immersive power of large-format photography. Mark Knopfler writes songs as intricately woven narratives that can take a hundred listens to fully reveal themselves. Ken Burns brings research and storytelling together in a way I deeply admire. In painting, Van Gogh proved that perfect realism is not required to convey everything, while the Dutch realists showed what disciplined observation can achieve. I am also drawn to Sargent, Renoir, Monet, Vermeer, and the illustrators of the early twentieth century.
That period attracts me because of its material culture, visual language, and moments of apparent quiet – especially the stretch just before dusk when everything seems to settle. I do not see the era as truly simple; I am interested in the stillness and human detail that surviving images sometimes preserve.
Charlie Chronopolis, 60 x 45 inches, oil on canvas.
5. What is your perspective on museums and galleries in 2026? Can they be improved, and if so, how? Do you have a favorite museum?
I love spending time in museums and galleries, and I believe they matter more now than they have in a long time. Seeing a painting in person cannot be replicated digitally: the way light hits the surface, the depth of the color, the scale, the brushwork, and the evidence of every choice. You have to stand in front of it.
I would like to see institutions devote more energy to promoting living and working artists. Museums are vital stewards of the past, but they can also help audiences discover the people creating important work now. Galleries can do the same by presenting contemporary work with the care, context, and sense of occasion historically reserved for established names.
I also think we have lost some of the sense that a painting is a treasure. The way a work is hung, lit, and framed tells you how it is being held and what it means. I now build my stretchers, prepare my canvases, and construct my frames in my own studio. Sending out a painting without a considered frame can feel like a sentence without punctuation.
As for favorites, I love getting lost in the vastness of the Louvre in Paris. I equally enjoy the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, particularly for the way it presents its Sargent paintings.
6. What is your perspective on Artificial Intelligence and whether or not it can be used as a tool for artists. If it can be, how would it be used?
AI forces us to ask uncomfortable but useful questions about creativity. If a model can emulate almost any visual language in seconds, what remains distinctly human? For me, the answer is not to reject every new tool. It is to become more deliberate about the parts of art that depend on lived experience, judgment, touch, and imperfection.
I use AI as a jumping-off point for curiosity. It lets me ask, ‘But wait – why?’ I do not treat it as a source of truth. I treat it more like an alcoholic uncle who heard a story once: interesting enough to start a conversation, but not someone you quote without checking. I use it to enhance references, test ideas, and formulate visual concepts before I commit time to a sketch or canvas.
The eventual painting draws from many sources: old photographs, personal sketches, newspapers and magazines, and physical objects in the studio – bicycles, books, water bottles, helmets, or whatever else is around me. AI may help me test a possibility, but it does not replace research, observation, composition, or the hand that makes the painting.
One real challenge is that artists increasingly need to show their process because viewers have learned to distrust imagery. My response is to make the work human at every stage and document that process: building the stretcher, preparing the canvas, painting, and framing it by hand.
Couch Theory, 60 x 48 inches, oil on canvas.
7. Knowing it’s impossible to choose a favorite piece (it’s like having to choose a favorite child), what is one of your pieces that you absolutely love?
Couch Theory (above). It began with a feeling cyclists know intimately: coming home after a long, demanding ride, finding something to eat, and collapsing into a state of complete, well-earned rest. I wanted to paint that particular combination of exhaustion, safety, warmth, and satisfaction. The bicycle is present, but the painting is really about what the effort has done to the body and the room.
What made me love the work even more was hearing a fellow artist and collector interpret it very differently. Where I saw earned recovery, he saw someone lonely and drinking alone in an apartment. That stopped me. Both readings were valid, and the difference had less to do with the painting than with what each of us brought to it. That is what I hope a painting can do: leave enough space for the viewer to enter.
8. Do you have a favorite artist or one you find inspiring?
Norman Rockwell. I admire his storytelling ability, his combination of drawing and painting, and the research and preparation behind each finished work. He could make a single image feel like a complete narrative, yet that apparent ease rested on enormous discipline. Add his ability to execute consistently over an extended career, and he becomes someone I continually strive to emulate.
Tour de France, 60 x 40, oil on canvas.
9. How do you see your work evolving? Do you have any specific goals, or do you follow your inspiration where it leads you?
For 2026 and 2027, I have committed to a fifty-painting body of work, The Golden Age of Cycling, centered on the period from roughly 1890 to 1930. The bicycle dramatically expanded personal mobility during those years and gave many people a new experience of independence. It was also a transitional moment: bicycles transformed everyday travel just before motorcycles and automobiles reshaped it again.
The subject is deeply personal. I have ridden bicycles my entire life; growing up, a bike was my only transportation. Cycling evolved with me. I have completed twelve Ironman triathlons, joined a team for Race Across the West in 2013, and taken part in long, multi-day endurance rides all over the globe. After enough hours in the saddle, you read a rider’s posture, fatigue, and relationship to the road differently. Painting cycling was a natural convergence of my history, physical experience, and artistic interests.
As of August 2026, I am working on No. 14, 1910 Dormitory, an oil painting measuring 68 by 84 inches – about two and a half times the surface area of my usual canvas. It is my largest and most complex painting to date. I can see the work continuing to grow in scale, even if that means producing fewer paintings over time.
My goal is to exhibit the series in several locations, whether in full or in carefully selected groups. I would especially love to see the largest works installed prominently, where their scale can do what it was meant to do.
The artist – Christopher Watson
10. If you weren’t an artist, what would you be instead?
In my other life, I am a software engineer and deeply entrenched in technology. I have spent decades building digital things that people use and that, eventually, disappear as hardware, platforms, and standards change. Painting represents the antithesis of that work: it is physical, tactile, imperfect, and potentially more permanent than its maker. So if I were not an artist, the honest answer is that I would still be an engineer and builder – but painting provides a form of making that technology cannot.
11. What is the tough thing about being an artist, and what is the great aspect of it?
The difficult thing is that you can never see your own work the way another person does. After hundreds of hours with a canvas, you possess a view of it no one else can have, but you can also become buried in details and miss what is obvious to a fresh eye. At some point the work has to speak for itself. That is the curse.
The gift is the other side of the same idea: paintings are mirrors of emotion. Ten people can stand before the same work and see ten different things because each person brings a different history and energy to it. Someone may interpret a painting in a way I never imagined, and that is not a failure of communication. It is extraordinary.
Painting is also profoundly independent. A piece begins as an idea and a feeling long before the canvas exists, so by the time I place the first stroke, the blank canvas is actually the midpoint of the work. I have committed to the problem and cannot wait to discover how I will solve it.
The Crescent Moon, 40 x 60, oil on canvas.
12. What is your schedule as an artist… Do you work by day or night, or both, and do you work as long as you please or do you slate particular time frames for creating?
I paint every day. Most pieces require weeks or months, so each one accumulates across many sessions. I do not paint to practice. I simply paint.
The schedule depends on how I am feeling. Some days I am up before sunrise; other days I do not begin until after dark. I work until I can feel that I am no longer accomplishing anything useful. I also let the painting decide what comes next. I may enter the studio intending to work on one section and find myself drawn to another. That freedom is where much of the spontaneity comes from. Some sessions last a few minutes; others last sixteen hours. The work still gets done.
13. How do you market and promote your artwork or portfolio website?
Publishing has become part of my process. I share work in progress almost every day through photographs and video, and I value the feedback that develops along the way. People become invested in a painting before it is finished. My website, velopaintings.com, is dedicated to The Golden Age of Cycling and includes the series, studio journal, available originals, prints, commissions, and studio updates. I am also active on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and Threads.
Alpine Ascent, 48 x 60, oil on canvas.
14. Do you have any exciting, heartening, disheartening, or alarming customer tales?
What has been most heartening is seeing people connect with the work on their own terms. A fellow artist and collector once listened as I explained Couch Theory as the reward after a long ride – the well-earned collapse. He saw something entirely different: a lonely person drinking alone in an apartment. His interpretation affected me profoundly because both readings were true. The painting held my experience, but it also made room for his. Encounters like that remind me that once a work leaves the studio, it begins a life I cannot control – and should not want to.
15. Is it sometimes tough to part with a piece you created because you put so much of yourself in it?
Absolutely. Paintings take on lives of their own in the studio. They hang on the walls as they dry, and each carries memories of the problems I had to solve. Letting one go can be difficult, but it is also a proud moment: someone else values the work enough to live with it, and the painting gets to enter a new world.
16. Do you gift loved ones and friends with art, or keep those realms separate and view it strictly as a business?
I give work away regularly, but the pieces are usually created specifically for the recipient. They might be personal portraits or subjects that resonate with that person’s history or interests. A handmade, bespoke work is one of the most meaningful gifts I can offer. That practice remains distinct from the paintings created for the commercial collection.
The Three Sisters, 48 x 60, oil on canvas.
17. What do you want to tell readers about the art world?
Do not be intimidated by it. Spend time with work in person and pay attention to what holds you there. You do not need permission or specialized language to have a genuine response to a painting.
We are also at a turning point. As more of life becomes digital, I believe physical, handmade work will carry renewed meaning. A painting has presence. It occupies space, records time, and can outlast both the technology surrounding it and the person who made it. I hope museums, galleries, collectors, and readers continue to support the living artists doing that work now.
18. How did you choose the particular type of art you create over other types of art? Do you go through phases where you’ll try different mediums, sizes, styles of art or do you deep dive into the area you want to fully fathom?
It has been an evolutionary process. Photography taught me how to frame and observe. Acrylics gave me my first experience of moving an image onto canvas. Oils ultimately suited the way I want to work: large, slowly, and across many sessions. Because an oil painting remains workable and may take weeks to dry, starting and stopping become part of the medium rather than an interruption.
A few constraints now run through the work. I am drawn to large scale, visible brushwork, and vivid color, but I paint with a palette of only five pigments and mix everything else myself. Limitation creates coherence and forces invention. I also build compositions from many forms of reference – archival photographs, sketches, newspapers, magazines, and objects around the studio. Each painting may take dozens of sessions, and I have to learn how to return to the same emotional and visual world day after day.
1903 Tour de France, 48 x 60 inches, oil on canvas.
19. Where can readers purchase your art?
Originals and museum-quality limited-edition prints are available through velopaintings.com. The site also provides information about commissions, private studio viewings in Peterborough, and gallery or museum inquiries. New paintings are added as they are completed, and readers are always welcome to contact me directly at chris@velopaintings.com.
20. Do you have any insightful tips for emerging artists?
Start with what you have today rather than waiting for perfect materials, more time, or a better idea. Consistency matters more than intensity. Work on your projects regularly, even when you only have a few minutes.
Do not be afraid to get in over your head. Attempt something that seems too large or too complicated, because solving the problems it creates will teach you more than staying comfortable. Make work you genuinely care about, not work designed only for money, recognition, or approval. That gives it the best chance of finding the people who will care about it too.
Finally, stop chasing perfection. Human beings are messy, emotional, and inconsistent, and those qualities are not defects to remove from the work. They are often where the work becomes yours. Most of all, be patient.
Connect with Christopher Watson
Christopher Watson welcomes inquiries from galleries, museums, collectors, and curators regarding exhibitions, acquisitions, commissions, and private studio viewings.
velopaintings.com | @velopaintings | chris@velopaintings.com
