Does Every Picture Tell a Story? A Conversation with Artist Joseph Watson for Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #51

Sto­ry­telling is an essen­tial part of Las Vegas artist Joseph Wat­son’s paint­ing method­ol­o­gy, whether he’s cre­at­ing city scenes or pub­lic sculp­ture or chil­dren’s illus­tra­tions. So how does the nar­ra­tive an author may have in mind affect the view­er, and is this dif­fer­ent for dif­fer­ent types of art?

Joseph is per­haps best known as the illus­tra­tor of the Go, Go, GRETA! book series and does online stream­ing of draw­ing ses­sions through Insta­gram and Face­book. On this episode of Pret­ty Much Pop, he joins your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt to explore the pic­ture-nar­ra­tive con­nec­tion and more gen­er­al­ly how know­ing about the cre­ation of an image affects our recep­tion of it, touch­ing on Guer­ni­ca, Where the Wild Things Are, Dr. Seuss, The Chron­i­cles of Nar­nia, and more.

You can browse Joseph’s work at josephwatsonart.com, and you’re real­ly going to want in par­tic­u­lar to look at a cou­ple of the works that we con­sid­er explic­it­ly:

• The paint­ing that he gives us the whole sto­ry for is “Walk Up, Walk Out.” (And yes, there are X’s in the win­dows, but I’m pret­ty sure what Eri­ca was ask­ing about was the one that the dog has just walked across in the top row, whose mean­ing will remain a mys­tery!)
• Bri­an invites us to impose mean­ing on the cov­er of Go, Go GRETA! Busy As Can Be with­out read­ing the book. Also, you can see the var­i­ous con­cept draw­ings for Gre­ta.
• Eri­ca near the end asks about the inclu­sion of the “Hon­or­able Men­tion” tro­phy in Joseph’s “Ele­ments of Inspi­ra­tion.”
• Joseph also men­tions his flower series and cars made of musi­cal instru­ments.

Oth­er sources we looked at in prepa­ra­tion for this dis­cus­sion include:

• “The Uncom­fort­able Truth About Children’s Books” by Daskha Slater
• “Chil­dren’s Book Illus­tra­tion Mas­ter­class — Use of Colour and Style,” a video by Shoo Rayn­er
• “How ‘The Snowy Day’ Became an Endur­ing Illus­tra­tion of Diver­si­ty” by Abil­gail Cain
• “10 of the Great­est Children’s Book Illus­tra­tors, from EH Shep­ard to Quentin Blake” by Matthew Den­ni­son
• “The Trag­ic Sto­ry Behind Pablo Picas­so’s Guer­ni­ca, One of World’s Most Famous Paint­ings” by Andrey V.
• “10 World Famous Paint­ings with Inter­est­ing Back­sto­ries” by Shyam T. Unni
• “35 Pow­er­ful Pho­tos That Tell a Sto­ry” from Jot­Form (The dis­cus­sion actu­al­ly did­n’t get to pho­tog­ra­phy; that’ll have to wait for a future episode. Adver­tis­ing is anoth­er rel­e­vant area we should pick up lat­er.)

Fol­low Joseph on Insta­gram @josephwatsonart; also Twit­ter and Face­book.

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This week, it includes a par­tic­u­lar­ly philo­soph­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tion of the notion of escapism and how dif­fer­ent that is from so-called seri­ous pur­suits. Is this just a ver­sion of the high-low cul­ture dis­tinc­tion that we large­ly reject­ed in episode one? This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.