What I Did on My Sommer Vacation

Posted on August 16, 2018 by DIRNDL SKIRT

Bert copy

I won’t kid myself, I couldn’t have hacked* Woodstock. I am referring to the one and only original “3 days of peace & music,” August of 1969. I don’t like being outside my own little universe when it’s warm, muggy, muddy, and rainy. What would I have done in a crowd of half-a-million? I’d be in the freak-out tent without even doing any drugs.

My counterculture activities consisted of hanging an Easy Rider poster on the wall of my pink bedroom and protesting in favor of long hair on our boys at Cedar Cliff High School. Of course, I was horrified by the war in Vietnam, and I cried myself to sleep after Bobby Kennedy was shot. Martin Luther King’s assassination, race riots, man on the moon, the Manson murders, hippies, Yippies, Life and Time magazine coverage of LSD—all were wallpapering my suburban life. But I wasn’t really fully engaged. I missed something important, I know.

Dilemma du jour copy

This summer has been warm, muggy, muddy, and rainy. I am in my own little universe, revisiting Woodstock as an anthropologist of my teenage self, an archivist of the era that I lived through but did not fully absorb.

Now I race the clock to complete an illustrated memoir—By The Time I Got To Woodstock—by next year’s 50th anniversary.

Bert Sommer played Woodstock as his very first gig, and got the first standing ovation of the concert. What followed is a story unto itself, and I bet you never heard of him. Neither did I, and I want to change that. I wrote an original essay about him that got picked up by Boom Underground, and I am hoping to flesh it out into a larger article by next year. Hello, New Yorker? Rolling Stone? New York Times? (High Times?)

Meanwhile, today is the 49th anniversary of Day 2, Bert has already played his 10-song set, and he is golden. Until he fell thorough the cracks.

* 1969 slang for “handled,” “endured.”

video courtesy youtube

Before SoHo Became SoHo-hum

Posted on January 23, 2016 by DIRNDL SKIRT

At about the same time that Rosanna Arquette’s character was “Desperately Seeking Susan,” deep in SoHo, I was in the same neighborhood desperately seeking a new frontier. It was the mid-1980s, and for nearly nine years I bore witness to the once desolate streets paving way to packs of traipsing tourists elbowing me off my own sidewalks. SoHo was no longer my backyard, but becoming a brand.

I moved to Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, a mostly West Indian neighborhood that had taken root during “white flight” in the 1960s. On the corner of Washington Avenue, my once grand prewar building loomed with others along the Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux-designed thoroughfare, in dogged determination. They were up against the invading crack epidemic and race tensions between Lubavitcher Hasidic Jews (who also had a stake in the area known as Crown Heights), and the struggling black community. The exhilaration of uncertainty laced with creative potential zapped me almost the way it had fifteen years previous, when I first moved from the suburbs of Pennsylvania to a down, but not quite out, New York City.

(Ford to City: Drop Dead!)

Across the street I faced the splendor of the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, behind me were doberman pinschers on brownstone rooftops patrolling the drug dens below. I was sandwiched in between, and continued working in my sprawling apartment on my commercial illustration, delivering it to Manhattan clients in person via the IRT.

While SoHo was busy morphing from an art mecca to a shopping mall, there were some genuinely exciting moments, as street art and graffiti blurred with fashion, fame, music, and action. Inevitably, innocence soured into irony that girded the cast iron district, and Art and Commerce clamped together, squeezing out anyone and anything that could no longer survive or no longer wanted to.

images

But before the tipping point, living in SoHo was fun and thrilling. I was creating fashion art churned up by street energy and the music on my MTV.

(Beep Beep!)

1980 – Steven Meisel’s adult class

Early 1980s – mixed media (fabric, paper, pastel)

1980 – Steven Meisel adult class

Miami Vice/Bowie influence (mixed media). And who didn’t have Wayfarer Ray Bans?

Ms. Skein ~ Promo for Wool Council (mixed media)

Cut Paper

Cosmopolitan Magazine job – mixed media (Cello-tak & paper)

All street photography snatched from the internet.

All art Copyright Sharon Watts

Carrie Donovan & The Gray Lady & Me

Posted on November 11, 2015 by DIRNDL SKIRT

In 1991, I was being photographed in front of The New York Times building on West 43rd Street, its globed lamps and distinctive typeface serving as focal points while prompts were called out by the photographer, George Lange. My large art portfolio was wedged under my arm, tight against my leather biker jacket-clad torso. With my Great Aunt Lenora’s crocheted scarf cocooning my neck and a tube skirt snug around my legs, I strode down the block like I owned it. Looking slightly up, my face was captured in a smile, crimped along the edges with a bit of self-consciousness.

I was chosen by The New York Times fashion editor Carrie Donovan—a character right out of the Audrey Hepburn classic film Funny Face—for a Sunday Magazine feature story about Manhattanites deemed to have personal style. Carrie, in her ubiquitous black and leopard prints and super-sized accessories, saw me once a week in whatever ensemble I had thrown together that day; I was also the illustrator she had chosen for her By Design column that appeared Tuesdays in the newspaper’s Style section.

I would enter the mythic, monolithic building from the street and head over to a line-up of phones on a marble ledge, waiting to be called into their roles as liaisons with people higher up in this bastion of journalism. Dialing Carrie’s extension, I passed the receiver to a security guard, then got the nod to go through the turnstiles and over to the elevators. Once I landed on nine, I made my way through a moat of bullpen cubicles, then was given the signal and admittance to Carrie’s inner sanctum. Now I would experience the heady feeling of being the center of her universe for ten minutes, as I presented my art for her approval.

“This is divine!” she might warble.

Or “Hmmm, don’t you think it’s just a bit de trop?”

Sometimes, if she was just finishing up the story, I had to do the job entirely on the spot. This last minute deadline would send me around the corner to the design department to borrow art supplies and a surface to work on, a pearl-encrusted fashion gun to my head.

My weekly gig was fun, sometimes stressful, but most of all, a fulfillment of destiny. I had promised myself when I was a teenager that I would one day be in The New York Times. I had meant my artwork, but here I was, like Marlo Thomas in That Girl, and Mary Richards in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, in love with my job, my life, and most of all, my city.

I did this for nearly a decade, during which time Carrie eventually retired and passed the reins of By Design to Anne-Marie Schiro, and The Gray Lady went to color. I still was making my weekly rounds, in person.

That wasn’t Carrie’s final act, however. She went on to be a surprise hit in Old Navy TV ads.

On November 12, 2001, Carrie passed away. I hadn’t noticed, hadn’t realized, hadn’t wondered until much later. I was too caught up in post-9/11 and missed her obituary. When I found out, I was dismayed that this grande dame had quietly left the stage without my being able to say au revoir.

So I’ll say it now. It was a pleasure working with and for you, not a bit de trop, and always divine.

Candy Cane Memories

Posted on December 8, 2014 by DIRNDL SKIRT

credit: Me and My Green Bin

Growing up in the early 1960s, and being a kind of girly-girl, I do remember I liked my food pink. And sugary. When standing in line with my mom at Acme Supermarket, the impulse buy of choice near the cash register was those awful (to me now) pink marshmallow cookies with white coconut sprinkles. This was before red dye #2 was banned.

My mother, Shirley, and me in her state-of-the-art kitchen, 1957.

But at Christmas time, we made cookies. Mom did like to bake, if not actually cook. (Hey, it was the Atomic Age, and she had better things to do, like paint!) One of my favorites from that era was candy cane cookies. We had to divide the dough, and color one half. Then keep it moist until we twisted the braids together and curved them into the cane hook. Some baking, and voila! This was a cookie that actually tasted as good as it looked, as opposed to sand tarts. For all the glitter and sprinkles I shook onto them, they were always a letdown to me after they came off the sheet.

I no longer bake anything remotely like the candy cane cookie, since I have gotten much healthier in my eating habits. But a recent call for baking memories from one of my favorite blogs, A Hundred Years Ago, got me thinking about these cookies, and I realize that they probably still influence me today, in my art, if not my baking.

Happy Holidays to all!

I want to credit a fellow blogger for her contribution to the candy cane cookie. I shared her photo of the original recipe. Read her post for more on this classic!

A Blair Affair

Posted on June 6, 2013 by DIRNDL SKIRT

In the late 1970s and early 80s, the punk scene in New York City was settling into a creative humus for artists of every ilk. Even if you didn’t frequent the Mudd Club, its vibe permeated the air and you absorbed it by osmosis. The era’s music dictated the creative arts: Patti Smith was high priestess in her white tattered T-shirts and skinny black jeans. Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine, she snarled in a plaintive three-note mantra. The very notion of “fashion” was tossed in a shredder and literally pinned back together. I was taking an evening fashion drawing class at Parsons School of Design, taught by Steven Meisel, my contemporary, an illustrator for Women’s Wear Daily (just before he went on to achieve superstardom as a photographer). In our very first class he cracked the whip and commanded: FUCK IT UP! Which meant carving into the drawing pad with our pen as scalpel and excising whatever in our artist-psyches was pretty and polite and safe. Play up the dark, the extreme, the anti-fashion. That was all this “good girl” needed to hear.

Years later I am rediscovering my drawings from that class and remembering that time, along with my friends Michele and Robin. We agree on one thing: Blair was our favorite model. She was petite with short-cropped white-blonde hair and bee-stung red lips, and wore the best fashion retro-mix of anyone I’ve ever known. It was impossible to get a bad drawing of her, she was that good. We didn’t know at the time that she too was a talented artist. Thirty-three years later, Blair Thornley is a successful illustrator and animator whose art looks exactly how I would imagine it to. Wonderful, magical, uniquely Blair-like. Take a peek into her world HERE.

What I found in my attic:

We drew on 18 X 24 pads, often still not getting the whole figure on. My drawings from this time don’t fit on the scanner, and despite Robin’s patient tutorial in splicing, I am still fumbling in Photoshop, lost in layers.

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Michele Wesen Bryant and I have almost identical drawings, since we were in the same classroom. She has gone on to teach and write, still at the cutting edge as she inspires and guides her fashion design students. Her archival masterwork of Women’s Wear Daily art is collected in WWD Illustrated: 1960s — 1990s

CLICK HERE for a post from Michele’s blog MORE FASHION DRAWING, where she shares more art and Steven Meisel stories.

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Robin drew Blair in Richard Rosenfeld’s class at Parsons School of Design in the early 80s, just after Meisel got his first photography break. He never looked back. She and I hired models together in the 90s, but not Blair. By then she was on her own brightly-lit path. Robin is now a successful designer at Robin Read Art & Design.

The lean and mean street looks of the late 70s and early 80s billowed into the era of MTV, opening the doors for video to become the premier enabler of fashion extremism and celebrity-worship, with the Material Girl muscling her way onto the scene. Ironically, it was Meisel who took some of her earliest photos. Meanwhile, some of our classmates and models and other artist contemporaries were dying of AIDS.

CALLING ALL ANGELS.

all images copyrighted

Plenty of Plaid-itude ~ From Baby Steps to Burberry

Posted on April 30, 2013 by DIRNDL SKIRT

I think I probably learned how to walk wearing plaid. Growing up in the ’50s meant Peter Pan collars and puffed sleeves and plaid (oh my!)

Years later, around the millennium, I would be immersed in Burberry plaid, participating in the company’s makeover from dependable, upper crust yet slightly dowdy British icon to its incarnation of everything hip. Kate Moss modeled and young Japanese fashionistas made a B-line to the NYC 57th Street store. That shopping bag was wallpapering the whole town. Meanwhile, I still couldn’t afford it, didn’t particularly like it, but it was sure fun to draw!

I was hired by the VP of visual display to create a series of iconic British scenes for the flagship store on Regent Street, London, with the loose line and sense of whimsy that had become my trademark. Painted on Arches watercolor paper, my palette was black and white with the traditional beige and red. I lay the line down first, then added the plaid in gouache. Over several years I ended up completing over a hundred paintings for store launches in cities all over the world. After London came New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Paris, and Barcelona. I had plaid Eiffel Towers, and King Kong with a plaid scarf wrapped around his neck as he climbed the (matching) Empire State Building. Barcelona’s Gaudi mosaics were maddeningly plaid, and the Hollywood sign was no longer white, but…Yep. You get the idea.

Campaigns come and go. My paintings that used to adorn all these stores (I even played Vegas) are who knows where, now? The original art was never returned to me, as it should have been. I tried to reclaim it, or at least locate the persons responsible for the accountability, but September 11th had happened and I was distracted and exhausted. To Burberry I was just a vendor. I pushed away all my plaid-painting memories, with nothing left but the aftertaste as a bitter reminder of how so many things in my life had suddenly turned sour.

Last week I got an email out of the blue. A young man in London had been given a piece of framed art from someone’s office in the Regent Street store, after it relocated. A tiny name at the bottom led him to me through some google detective work. Was I the artist, he asked?

Yes, I am.

This one was a self-promotional mailer:

And below is a tiny fraction of the Burberry art that I did between 1999-2002. Back then, I had no scanner and the discs that I obtained were incomplete.

Click on image to enlarge.

So, I “Heart” New York and I love L.A.! Thanks for the memories of dressing you up in plaid.

And one more parting shot, from last year. The scarf was a gift. It is warm.

I still can’t afford Burberry.

all art copyrights belong to Sharon Watts

Lost & Found In Translation

Posted on April 11, 2013 by DIRNDL SKIRT

I was contacted to be featured in a Beauty/Health magazine called BODY in Taiwan. Here are the results…and the original pre-edited Q&A for those of us who only speak Chinese menu.

To enlarge pages above, just click on them.

BODY: Hello, could you please introduce yourself.

My name is Sharon Watts and I am an artist and writer living in Beacon, NY, a town on the Hudson River about an hour and a half north of NYC.

BODY: Describe yourself any optimistic DNA related?

I am artistic, therefore I have many moods! But mostly I try to live fully in each moment. That is the most fulfilling and spiritual thing I can do for myself, and as a ripple effect, for others. Luckily I see the glass as half-full most of the time.

BODY: Could you please share with us what kind of life you are into right now?

I think of myself as a healthy moderate (and a vegetarian) in many ways, especially about making a small carbon footprint on the planet. I am very opinionated about recycling, mindless consumerism and waste, and the need for gun control here in the US and women’s rights worldwide. But mostly I like to be quiet and enjoy what is in my own backyard, both literally and metaphorically. I have a bird bath and trees that attract a lot of birds and squirrels.

BODY: What does art act in your life?

I have always drawn. I don’t know what it is not to want to create something. I recognize as I get older that we can be creative in many diverse outlets. I also write, take photos, garden, and just “putter” and arrange my cherished objects, both in my home and also in my assemblage art which is very different from my fashion art. Art calms me and motivates me.

BODY: Are you fulfilling your childhood dream as a fashion illustrator?

I fulfilled that dream when I had my illustrations featured in the New York Times. That truly was a childhood dream. I also did art for a weekly column by the (then) fashion editor Carrie Donovan, for nearly a decade. And also ads for Macy’s and many other stores.

BODY: You use multi media for your illustration, but which media and method are you most stuck with?

I work traditionally–with paint and ink mostly. I need to feel them in a tactile way in order to be happy. This goes back to my childhood, when my mother gave me pencils and paper and taught me how to draw princesses.

BODY: What is your normal daily routine?

First–coffee! My cats demand attention and I wake up slowly. I read the news and check email, then depending on the day, I either work in my home studio (for commercial art) or in my garage-studio which I use for more personal assemblage art. I hop around–I may go do errands in town, then come back to work. And if the weather is nice, there is always yard work to do! I guess I have a loosely defined routine.

BODY: What makes you relax?

I like to explore the “back pockets” of anything: old dusty shops, city streets, country back roads, my own archives of saved mementos: anything that might yield a treasure or surprise, or a new way of looking at something.

BODY: What’s your favorite thing to do?

Anything that has me totally immersed in the moment and fully present. But under that category I would have to say it could be anything from the obvious, doing personal artwork, to planning a getaway road trip to a new place.

BODY: What do you do at free time?

Whatever I feel like doing that day! Seriously, I honor my moods and do whatever I want. It might be organizing my art studio (which gets messy). Or it might be to curl up with a book and a cat on my lap.

BODY: What kind of style (clothing) makes you relax?

I wear Levis shrink-to-fit jeans almost every day, except in the summer I wear a lot of 1950s and 60s vintage cotton skirts. My cashmere sweaters in the winter are old and have some moth holes and cat hair, but if I put on a little lipstick I am ready to head almost anywhere. I am old enough to value comfort and personal style over trends. I usually manage to look arty as well, so I can get away with a lot!

BODY: Any exercise habit? If so, what kind?

I do yoga, and sometimes dance and hop around as I play my old LP records, then practice some punches and front snap kicks (I used to train at karate and have a black belt). Usually by the end of the GoGos’ “We Got the Beat,” I AM beat!

BODY: Is there any place where makes you happy?

My backyard, my boyfriend’s beautiful renovated barn in Pennsylvania, an empty beach, a Paris cafe. Actually–the place I am striving to be most happy is in my own head. Then it doesn’t matter geographically where I am, right?

Paris, Je t’aime!

Posted on October 1, 2012 by DIRNDL SKIRT

It’s October, and I wish I were in Paris. My first trip was in 1978. I was twenty-five years old. Paris pressed its imprint on me like a Toulouse-Lautrec lithography stone. Now I am forever drawing Eiffel Towers and café scenes. Here’s a journey through the years.

This was a promotional mailer, done in the early 1980s in the cut paper style that I was experimenting with. Matisse’s Jazz book had just been republished, and I was smitten. I now was drawing shapes with an X-acto blade and adding touches with colored pencils. My inner whimsy was definitely tapped into, like a genie out of the bottle.

The cut paper style evolved into tighter renditions of Paris icons, using Zip-a-Tone shading film and Letraset tape.

I even incorporated our cats, Be-Mo and Roxy, into Paris denizens.

This was part of a double-page spread done for Macy’s in 1987.

By the ’90s I was back to the brush.

With no signs of fatigue de Paris!

The single flirty eye was by now part of my signature.

This was inspired by Raoul Dufy.

This was for Newsweek International. The Chanel Lady was a character I employed a lot in my editorial assignments.

This is part of the Paris, Je t’aime series I am selling as prints in the Dirndl Skirt Shop.

Part of the Say:”La Vie” series that also will be featured in the Dirndl Skirt Shop.

Does this put you in the mood for Paris? I kind of thought it would.

C’est la vie.

Hopping The Pond @1984

Posted on August 15, 2012 by DIRNDL SKIRT

This gallery contains 11 photos.

In 1984, girls just wanted to have fun. And I just wanted to draw, dress up, and watch MTV. Lately I’ve been waxing nostalgic for an era that seems like just a few years ago, surely not the quarter century … Continue reading →

Dirndl Skirt Gatherings

Category Archives: fashion art

What I Did on My Sommer Vacation

Before SoHo Became SoHo-hum

Carrie Donovan & The Gray Lady & Me

Candy Cane Memories

A Blair Affair

Plenty of Plaid-itude ~ From Baby Steps to Burberry

Lost & Found In Translation

Paris, Je t’aime!

Hopping The Pond @1984

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