From Speaking in Tongues to Speaking Through Paint
Janna Watson’s contemporary abstractions do not ask for interpretation. They ask to be felt. Working between silence and sound, motion and stillness, Watson has developed a painterly language rooted in both physicality and transcendence. To begin, raised in rural Ontario by a Pentecostal pastor and two generations of artists, her work channels an expansive, embodied spirituality. Therefore, they forgoes narrative in favor of sensation, gesture, and chromatic mood.
Rather than using the canvas as a window or a stage, Janna Watson’s contemporary abstraction approaches it as a site of intuitive revelation. Furthermore, her polychromatic abstractions—unbounded by orientation—evoke emotional states rather than formalist structures. Each stroke is both deliberate and open-ended, a residue of movement suspended in time. Additionally, this is not abstraction as detachment, but abstraction as deep presence. Her panels speak with the urgency of prayer and the freedom of improvisation, offering what the artist calls “a language of utterance”—a phrase rooted in her early exposure to speaking in tongues.
The Language of Janna Watson Contemporary Abstraction
Watson’s practice is a study in contrasts. For example, neutral washes interrupt electric reds. Loose forms are paired with negative space. Colour carries the pulse of emotion, and the absence of colour offers its relief. Moreover, she builds each composition layer by layer—working on birchwood panels laid flat, allowing the material to guide the gesture. Ultimately, her marks range from soft to muscular, playful to solemn, forming a vocabulary that resists fixed meaning while insisting on emotional clarity.
In recent series such as Skywriting, Speaking in Tongues, Emotion Potion, and Undercurrent, Watson traverses inner and outer landscapes: the sky as muse, the heart as instrument, the unconscious as terrain. Also, her abstraction becomes autobiographical, not in subject but in process. These works are portals—not illustrations of experience, but active records of it. As she puts it, “self-discovery is fluid,” and so too is the composition: unbordered, multidirectional, and alive with spirit.
A Landscape Reimagined: A Queered Spirituality, A Grounded Practice
Lastly, Watson’s contemporary abstraction is grounded in defiance—of religious canon, of gendered expectation, and of painterly convention. Her early life was marked by spiritual rigor and personal rupture, including experiences with conversion therapy and a severing of path from the pastoral to the painterly. However, from this fracture, she built a new theology—one found not in scripture but in surface. Her canvases are not declarations. They are revelations.
Today, Watson maintains dual studios in Toronto and Grey County, moving between city energy and forest solitude. Also, her work has been widely exhibited and collected across North America. Still, she remains deeply attuned to what painting can hold: emotion, contradiction, vulnerability, and wildness. Her paintings are not self-referential, but relational—designed to enter conversation with one another and with the viewer, offering space for meaning to arise.
Recent Works
Janna Watson contemporary abstraction
