City Lit Alum Charmaine Watkiss
Charmaine Watkiss is a London-born artist to Jamaican parents. Preferencing pencil and paper and then using other materials such as watercolour, wax, ink, and coloured pencil her intricate and layered work brings powerful narratives to life.
Often being the conduit to what she calls ‘memory stories’ Charmaine’s work explores African ancestral traditions that survived the transatlantic and that are today an inherent part of culture in the Caribbean and the Americas.
Her preservative work is based on in depth historical research to visualise a shared and collective story but in a way that speaks to current and future cultural narratives and traditions.
As a City Lit alum, completing the Foundation Diploma in Art & Design in 2015, we were delighted to speak with Charmaine to find out more about her time with us and how it has influenced her career.
Video: Charmaine talks about her time at City Lit
Can you tell us about your time at City Lit?
I studied the UAL Art and Design Foundation course which I completed in 2015. The course was for just over a year and for me it was a way of me exploring what was important to me as an artist, I got the opportunity to try different things and to really push and experiment. So, my time here was really enjoyable.
Another thing that I really enjoyed about City Lit was that there was a broad age range on the course. I met people who worked in the film industry, in publishing, there were some older people who had retired but then some people who were just out of school too.
I liked the mix of people and there’s this very supportive community and energy when you study at City Lit.
It’s a very democratic place to study and that’s why before the foundation course I did a lot of short courses here as well. It’s just a very relaxed environment, very supportive, and they cater for everyone in the community as well so it’s just a really, really nice place to be.
I was working in advertising, I’d been a digital designer at that time for about 13-14 years and I was working across media, I did video and a lot of campaign work. It was pretty full on, and I think when I came to City Lit I wanted to reconnect to who I was as a creative person.
On the course itself, I picked painting and sculpture as my two pathways and enjoyed having a lot of mini one to one tutorials. For me, having come from a graphic design background, I was struggling at the time with this notion of responding to ideas instead of answering a brief - I was still very much in this mindset of ‘I’m going to answer this brief’.
Luckily, there was a tutor on the painting side who had also come from a graphic design background, and he was able to help me rethink the way I approach my work. He said I should treat working as an artist a bit like writing a poem, and he also said to take away as much as you can from the image until it’s about to fall apart. Those two things are things that I take with me to my studio practice today. I realised from doing that course that I’m a natural storyteller as well, so I consciously build a lot of visual motifs in my work and use symbols. All of those things definitely had their seeds planted on the City Lit course.
How did City Lit help achieve your goals?
I came to City Lit because I wanted to develop my artistic practice and City Lit very much helped me with that. Whilst I was on the course, I was freelancing part-time, but it gave me the space to really contemplate what was important to me as an artist. I had a lot of support from the tutors, particularly transitioning from graphic digital design into the realm of fine art. So, the course gave me a really good grounding in artistic practice and generating my own ideas and responding to things that I’m interested in.
Video: Charmaine talks about her art
Any tips for anyone interested in joining the Foundation Diploma Art & Design course?
I would say that for anyone interested in joining the Foundation Diploma in Art and Design course you should be prepared to work hard, be prepared to be inspired, and challenged. It is quite an intense course, even though its part time, there’s a lot to do so you will need to be open to that and to contributing and working with others as well.
Life after City Lit
I actually got straight onto an MA after City Lit and I did MA Drawing at Wimbledon. Then in 2020, I quit my day job in advertising, and I’m now working full time as an artist. It’s been pretty intense, I‘ve been busy, my career has taken off in a very good way and I’m currently working on a commission for the Liverpool Biennial which opens in June this year.
Video: Charmaine talks about life after City Lit
Charmaine’s work has continued to receive the acclaim it deserves, with her commissioned work on show in 2023’s Liverpool Biennial in June.
UAL Foundation Diploma in Art & Design
City Lit’s Centre for Advanced Practice is where you can find advanced courses from across all subject areas in Visual Arts. In many cases, this means well established courses of a year or longer, with outstanding reputations for preparing students for study at Bachelors or Masters level.
The UAL Foundation course at City Lit is one of those courses. This is a practical year-long course validated by the UAL awarding body. We've designed the course to give you the creative skills and the portfolio you need either to progress to undergraduate degree course at a university, set up as a practitioner, or to prepare you for work in the creative industries.
