Lifestyle & Culture

Finding a voice in art

By Grant Hines

Watson Mere didn’t speak until he was five years old. Instead, he expressed his wants and needs with pen and paper.

“So, if I wanted to use the bathroom, I would draw a toilet. If I wanted to eat, I would
draw a piece of spaghetti or spaghetti and meatballs, or something like that,” fine artist Mere, 37, said.

His works have hung at Gracie Mansion, the New York City mayor’s official residence, and at  Barclays Center, home of the Brooklyn Nets.

He uses Microsoft Paint software to create most of his art. But recently, he started brushing acrylic paint onto paper canvas. “I’m trying to become more free.”

He named one of his latest pieces, Goliath, after the giant in the Bible. Inspired by Haitian women bearing buckets, baskets and other items on their heads, it took him a year to finish. In it, a Black woman, wearing a sky blue dress, stands waist-high in a field of sunflowers. On her head, Mere explained, is the “weight of the world,” an oversized book and, piled on that, a mish-mash of things: A Macbook, textiles, a bottle of wine, bananas and other fruit. Her eyes are fixed on the one withering sunflower.

“It distracts her,” he said, “from this sense of freedom that she would be able to obtain if she locked into the abundance.”