Page 12 - Senior Link Magazine Winter 2024 - Online Magazine
P. 12
LOCAL LEGENDS
Embracing Life
James C. Watkins
by Marita Tedder
James Watkins in his home gallery
o enter the home studio
and gallery of Lubbock- become known. He inherited a deep TTU’s highest faculty honor, the
Tbased, multi-award-winning appreciation of land from his father Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished
ceramist and educator, James C. and grandfather—which translates Professorship—which is an award
Watkins, is to be filled with a sense to skillfully and carefully using clays recognizing outstanding research
of history, elegance, and awe. It and other organic materials, such as and other scholarly achievements.
is easy to see why his work is the red dust he’s gathered following Following his retirement in 2018,
celebrated around the globe. Lubbock’s dust storms. Watkins became a Paul Whitfield
Though born in Kentucky, Watkins Watkins arrived in Lubbock in Horn Professor Emeritus.
was raised in a farm family in 1977 after receiving his MFA from Following a divorce, pending
Athens, Alabama. At age six, Indiana University and BFA from retirement, and unsuccessful dating,
based on his constant drawing, his the Kansas City Art Institute. Watkins envisioned a life utilizing
grandmother suggested that he Following a short time working as his travel trailer—with his portable
might “be an artist one day.” With a visiting professor at Hampton kiln in the back of his truck, visiting
that belief, she supplied him with University in Virginia, he made various regions around the country,
Big Chief Tablets—which he filled Lubbock his home. Here, he married digging up local clay, and making
with sketches of horses, cowboys, and raised his family. small- and medium-sized vessels
and Indians at the rate of one pad that would be glazed with local
a day! He won his first of many art Watkins has filled a variety of roles materials. He’d document all his
awards at age 15 when his mother, in Lubbock. Between 1978 and experiments. At the end of the year,
prompted by a “draw me” ad, sent 1983, he served as the director and he planned to have exhibitions
in one of his drawings. As a winner, organizer of the Mackenzie Terrace and publish a catalog of finished
the young Watkins received months Pottery Center—a City of Lubbock work and experimentation notes.
of instruction and critique through sponsored public arts facility. At He’d repeat this each year until
correspondence art instruction. Texas Tech University, he taught he’d covered the entire U.S. While
architecture delineation for 35 years
Much of his current work is still and architectural ceramics for 12 the idea may still come to fruition
influenced by those early days of years at the Huckabee College of someday (clay and oxides are
farm life, where he watched his Architecture. During his tenure, he different wherever you go), it was
mother and grandmother make received numerous awards and, as shelved when he met Luisa in 2014
soap and wash clothes in heavy, a 2005 Senior Fulbright Scholar, he at a class he was teaching through
black cast-iron pots. Those pots built a ceramics program in Vietnam LHUCA. They married in 2016.
inspired the large, double-walled at the Ho Chi Minh City University Throughout his 50 years of working
caldrons for which Watkins has of Architecture. In 2006, he received with clay, Watkins has always
12 Lubbock Senior Link
