Cammie Watson is an award-winning, third-generation painter, author and illustrator whose work has received honors from Kirkus Reviews, the Golden Book Club, Reading Rainbow, the Society of Illustrators, and Provincetown Art Association & Museum.
Cammie’s work was presented in a solo show at the Cape Cod Museum of Art and on WCVB TV’s evening news magazine Chronicle. It has won its place in many juried shows, including at the Cape Cod Museum of Art and the Provincetown Art Association & Museum, and is in the Cape Cod Museum of Art’s permanent collection and numerous private collections.

Early artistic training was largely from family and self study. After high school, Cammie completed a three-year apprenticeship in Germany. She graduated cum laude from Yale College, where she studied philosophy, drawing, color theory, and sculpture. More recently she has studied with Naoto Nakagawa, Jim Peters, Don Stone and Robert Douglas Hunter. She is a member of the Provincetown Art Association and the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and has taught classes at Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill and the Academy for the Performing Arts in Orleans.

Cammie grew up in Putney, Vermont, and Truro, Massachusetts. Her father, Aldren Auld Watson, is a painter, illustrator, designer, and author. Her mother, Nancy Dingman Watson, was a poet and children’s book author. Her paternal grandparents, Ernest and Eva Watson, were painters and pioneer color block print makers, and Ernest was founder and editor of American Artist magazine and co-founder of Watson-Guptill Publications.

Cammie lives in Truro with her children.

Artist's Statement:
I work in a variety of media: oils, sumi-e, watercolor, and collage, as well as pen and ink for children's book illustration. The underlying constant is the drive to draw on that elusive, powerful inner self that lurks in all of us. When painting, I try to suspend the analytical side of my brain in favor of the intuitive.

I thrive on the bounty and beauty of the world around me. I am awed by the natural world, and the capacity of humans to experience all the joys and sorrows that their complicated lives deliver. By fully accepting this all, one feels completely alive. It is this energy that I want to tap into and that I hope will give power to each piece I create.

When I work, the creative process begins with the challenge of moving colors and shapes into a meaningful composition. Then, at a certain point, the work takes over. It acquires a life of its own, apart from me, and all I can do is follow. When this process is successful, mysteriously and out of nothing, something beautiful arises and goes forth.