It’s common for almost any artist to explore different avenues or to develop side projects and tangents to their main gig or the outlet for which they’re best known.
But what you might not realize is how commonly all of those disparate, presumably separate creative outlets tend to all spark and develop alongside one another, no matter how different they might seem from the outside.
Take Oklahoma City’s Chandler Watson, who juggles everything from stand-up comedy to magazine and documentarian photography, and even visual arts from drawing to full-sized mural painting.
While it might seem like there’s a pretty wide gulf between the irreverence and non-seriousness of the comedy world and the quiet thoughtfulness and emotion of art and photography, Watson says that it’s always been a package deal for him since he was a child.
Chandler Watson: Comedy, I guess, kicked off everything, but when I was younger, I would always be doodling, sketching in class. And they're like “you're not paying attention,” but I would be listening better because I was drawing.
I'm like, just working on combining it all, but where it all kicked off was comedy.
I was just always having fun. That was my thing. It's like, I'm always going to have fun. My eighth grade English teacher said “you're going to be an entertainer one day.”
Brett Fieldcamp: But Watson’s journey to become that entertainer came with years of searching, developing, and refining a voice and a personality, years that also saw him continuing to build his skills with a pencil, a brush, and a camera all at the same time and all originally in that same simple intention to just have fun, often snapping candid photos of friends during hangouts and brainstorming jokes in his sketchbooks next to his art ideas.
But while he admits that his early comedy was usually aiming for shock value and edge, Watson eventually wanted to evolve his material to comment more cleverly and more thoughtfully on the world around him, the world that he’d already begun to capture more clearly through his camera.
Chandler Watson: I knew there was something more to talk about, I just had to mine it out. I had to go through like, I'm picturing myself sifting through my thoughts.
I really had to do that, and I think I destroyed all my old sketchbooks because they had my jokes in them. Kind of a little upset about some of it, but it was just, like, I don't like any of these jokes.
And I just started anew, just looking at things from a different perspective and talking about it differently. So it was still very much subversive, but the shock is a lot different. And my perspective, of course, is like I can say what I want, truly be myself, and people are listening to what I'm saying and how I feel.
Brett Fieldcamp: That new comedy of more overt social and political issues carried Watson through a stint living and performing in Los Angeles and touring the country, experiences that also brought opportunities to photograph the rapidly changing cities and communities of America in the 21st century.
But those concepts also found their way into his artwork, with his sharp geometric shapes and highly expressive, graffiti-styled color layering incorporating text and blunt, pointed questions such as the recurring “are you free?”
It’s a style and a voice that would come to a head on the side of a building in McAlester with his public mural “Marshall in Motion,” honoring Civil Rights icon Thurgood Marshall and his work defending the free speech protections of the First Amendment.
Chandler Watson: I think everything comes back to, like, feeling like I'm free with no constraints.
It's just capturing certain things that I just know won't ever be there again or it won't look the same. I'll grab my camera like “oh, let me go document how it looks for this day” and without even knowing it, I started documenting the city, documenting every city at that moment in time, because it's gonna change. Even if you don't think it's gonna change, it's gonna change.
Brett Fieldcamp: That goal of capturing a time, a place, or an idea, Watson says, is the centerpiece of all of his work. Whether skewering the social systems on stage or photographing those systems in real-time on the streets, it’s all just different forms of storytelling and different paths to the same expressions, with photos inspiring jokes and jokes inspiring paintings.
Chandler Watson: I had to like, really sit down and be like “okay, let's hone in.”
It was very observational storytelling. I got a lot of stories. So I love storytelling. I kind of lean into that more now.
It's all catching a story, man. But sometimes I don't know what the story is until I take, like, ten steps back and look at all the photos.
Brett Fieldcamp: You can keep up with Chandler Watson on Instagram and at his gallery and workspace, The Art House on 4th in Downtown OKC and you can check out his artwork and photography at chandlerwatson.com.
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