Music to your eyes: the colourful world of Australian artist Chris Watts
Turn the colour up
By 
FOR A LONG TIME, Chris Watts expressed himself at volume – literally. The Melbourne singer-songwriter spent years on stage, supporting the likes of Elton John and Robbie Williams, living inside the rhythm of touring and recording. Then Covid came along and all but killed the Australian live music industry overnight. During those lockdown days, Watts found himself alone with a canvas. “I started painting more and it just took over from there,” he tells Esquire.
“My head feels completely free in it. I’m not overly spiritual about it, but it does feel like it’s what I was meant to do here.”
Painting wasn’t entirely unfamiliar territory. Drawing had always been there, running quietly in the background. He was filling school books with sketches as a child, his figures already looking noticeably different from everyone else’s.
“Other kids would crowd around and watch me draw, like I was part of a circus act,” he recalls. “I didn’t have any idea of ‘art’ yet, just this early sense that what I was making felt more resolved than what was around me.”
By 13, he was spending his own money on art. His first purchase was a print by Californian artist Josh Agle, known professionally as Shag, whose bold, stylised world of 1970s leisure that Watts describes as “like stepping into a stylised memory of a party you were never actually at.”
It’s an advanced choice for an early teen that tells you something about how Watts sees: drawn to the bold, the oblique. Warhol quickly became a touchstone too, alongside a constellation of references that sprawl well beyond the obvious – Sofia Coppola films, Rolling Stones album sleeves, 1970s advertising campaigns.
“I don’t gravitate toward the default choice,” he says. “I like the alternative, the unexpected, the slightly off-centre decision that shifts the whole mood.”
In the studio, the process is more painstaking than the finished surface suggests. It begins with loose sketches, a stream of consciousness from hand to paper, before moving through progressive rounds of refinement – on canvas and in Adobe Illustrator, both, testing colour combinations until something clicks. The studio is never quiet; some days Mötley Crüe, other days Sinatra. He trusts his gut on when a piece is done and doesn’t linger. “If I sit on it for too long my brain starts getting ideas and that’s usually when it all goes sideways,” he says. “Less is more. It’s the same instinct I lean on with everything I make, whether it’s art or music.”
That music and art have always run on parallel tracks is central to understanding Watts. He directs his own music videos, designs his own album artwork and builds the entire visual environment around his creative world himself. “There’s one language,” he says, “just expressed through different mediums.”
Today, that language has earned him one of Australian art’s most coveted acknowledgements. Watts was announced as a finalist in the Archibald Prize 2026, his portrait of former AFL player Mitch Brown selected for the Art Gallery of New South Wales exhibition running 9 May to 16 August. Brown is a topical choice of subject, recognised as the AFL’s first openly bisexual male player; his decision to speak publicly about his identity was made against the grain of a sport where, as Watts notes, homophobia has hardly been consigned to history.
“Mitch’s vulnerability in sharing his story was a pivotal step for queer visibility in both the AFL and Australian men’s sport more broadly,” he says.
Brown, for his part, knew Watts wouldn’t deliver something comfortable: “His style is big and colourful and a bit unexpected, and that felt right,” Brown says. “He captures your attention, but with so much care and softness too.”
The timing of the announcement couldn’t be more serendipitous. In just days, Watts opens Wild Card, his solo exhibition at Art2Muse Gallery in Sydney.
The collection’s central subject – women, their confidence, their contradictions – is one Watts returns to with genuine, playful curiosity.
“The new collection explores a modern immortalisation of women,” he says. “How has our depiction of women shaped over time? I want to immortalise my perception, which is that they are multifaceted – there are parts they embrace and others that live just below the surface.”
It’s a theme that sits comfortably within his pop art framework, where surface beauty and psychological depth have always coexisted. Where can you see the confidence, he asks. Is there a hidden cheekiness? The playful, vibrant part? The questions animate the whole room.
“I love the tension between something slick and perfect versus something a little more wild and chaotic,” he says.
The pieces, he adds, flirt across the room with each other – each one standing alone while together building something closer to a mood, like a soundtrack.
“The work is loud on purpose. Bold colour, sharp energy. There’s a spark in the eyes that says not everything’s being given away.”
Wild Card runs at Art2Muse Gallery, Sydney, 5-18 May. The Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes 2026 is at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 9 May-16 August.
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