Helen Richter Watson a life in art
By María Eugenia Guerra
Helen took me through a small storeroom where she kept some studio equipment -- clay bats and sieves, jars of glazes, hand tools, grinders, and workshop detritus. As she identified objects that were unfamiliar to me, she would lift a tool or a jar and turn it in her potter's hands. Here was the evidence of the physicality of her life as an artist, the slurries, and shards, discards, rags, and stuff of the creation process -- all the things you don't see when you go to an exhibit where all is shiny perfection. For me that visit was when I felt most close to Helen and her work -- I am not a ceramist, but the space an artist works in and the tools an artist uses has a universal familiarity: there is a personal and physical ambiance in the work space created by an artist that another artist recognizes.
That is what Texas A&M International University art professor Janet Krueger told me of a visit with the late Helen Richter Watson, with whom Krueger met last spring at the old Richter home on Houston Street . They had met to work out the scope and the details of a retrospective exhibit of Watson's work for the inauguration of the gallery of the new TAMIU Fine and Performing Arts Center.
In the best of circumstances, Watson would have lived to see the TAMIU exhibit go up February 5 of this year and would have enjoyed an opening that was a celebration of her life in art, an exhibit so well received by Laredoans of all ages. She died August 25, 2003, six months before the exhibit opened.
"The Helen Richter Watson exhibit is a pivotal experience for us," said TAMIU president Dr. Ray Keck. "I very much wanted that first exhibit to be an exemplary Laredoan in the arts, someone whose life and work would embody the aspirations that building was built to stimulate. Helen Richter Watson gave her life to her art."
After more than a half-century in California, where she had lived and worked as an art student, a ceramist, and a college art instructor, Watson returned to Laredo in 1996, bringing with her -- in hundreds of sculptures, pieces of art, slides, sketches, books, recipes for glazes and clay mixes, and collections of correspondence -- the story of her life.
Watson resumed residency at the home her grandfather August Richter built in 1906. Though Helen and her brother Horace and baby Julia had spent their early years on the Richter Farm in south Laredo , the Houston Street home became the pivot on which family life turned after the untimely death of their father Horace Edward Watson, who came to Laredo as a Cornell-educated Army lieutenant.
An accomplished artist who has left in a well-defined body of work an artistic legacy of enormous proportions, Helen Richter Watson is often remembered and much missed by those who knew her and loved her.
Horace Watson remembers a little sister who had trouble staying on the family's Shetland pony on the farm. "I could ride it pretty well, but the pony just didn't like Helen," he said. "She took her own road by going out west to school and made a huge success of it. I was very proud of her. We all were."
Watson's younger sister Julia Jones remembers the sense of style her sister possessed as she designed dresses for herself and for Lydia Jackson, the queen of the junior-senior prom at Martin High School . "She made the patterns for the dresses from sheets of newspaper that she pinned together," Jones said, also recalling the animated coterie of friends in Watson's circle. "There was Billy Mims, E.H. Corrigan, Lydia , Barbara Mapus, Lola Bunn. They were always dancing."
Former classmate Corrigan recalled, "When Helen spoke, she surged. She spoke in grand terms, like someone building with words an enormous building of beauty and imagination. I felt I floated lightly in an almost giddy sort of way when she spoke," he said of the friend he still calls Whitey, a sobrenombre Corrigan remembers came about "when Lola wanted black hair and Helen bleached hers."
He continued, "She was fun-loving, and she had grace. Her height took her out of the realm of the ordinary. Her mother put her on the path to self-realization, untied the ribbons, and made her life a dream come true."
That path began with the train ride Watson took from Laredo to Los Angeles in 1942 to enroll at Scripps College , from which she graduated in 1947.
"Mother would load up the gold Packard with an ice chest, food, and water, and she and I would make road trips out west to visit Sister at school. Our mother was not afraid of the distance. She was an enlightened person. We made this trip often and enjoyed it," Jones recalled, adding that over the decades Watson routinely made the same trip from California to Laredo .
Despite an age difference between the Watson sisters, they were extremely close, Corrigan remembered. "Julia would say, 'You should see what Sis is doing out there.' They were for all their lives very important to each other."
"Sister dressed elegantly," said Jones. "She drove beautiful cars and wore beautiful clothes. It was the way she wore them that set her apart." She added that only recently Watson had sold the 1954 Thunderbird she had owned for decades.
"Sister was the first distinguished graduate from Scripps. She graduated with honors. Her life enriched all of our lives. We met really interesting people who were part of her life," she said, adding that Watson's professional relationship with artist Millard Sheets and the commissions he sent her way put her on the road to an acclaimed career in art. "Her work was everything to her," Jones said.
Though Helen was clearly fragile when we met, mentally she was quite sharp and still full of humor and opinion. She was all business and professionalism when it came to discussing the arrangements regarding her desires for the exhibit. At that point the building was still unfinished and we were simply gathering a preliminary idea of what her hopes and expectations were, what she anticipated, and a general mutual understanding on a timeline for the exhibit. She toured us through her home, studio, library, and collection, reminiscing about her colleagues at Otis and the collaborative nature of their relationships.
--Janet Krueger
Watson completed an M.F.A. at Claremont Graduate School and served on the art faculties of Chaffey College , Mount San Antonio College, and Otis Art Institute. She served as chair of the ceramics department at both Mount San Antonio and Otis, for two and 21 years, respectively.
Watson designed and executed a steady stream of commissions from the late 50s through the 70s, many in Texas and several in Laredo , including the well-known tile murals at Laredo National Bank on San Bernardo (1958) and a stoneware sculpture for Mall del Norte (1978).
Her colleague and former student Robert Glover recalled, "Helen was a source of genuine support throughout my student and teaching years at Otis. Her generosity was noteworthy, her affection genuine. I will really miss not being able to congratulate her on her retrospective or to talk with her again. However, I have wonderful memories of this rich experience with Helen and will cherish them dearly."
A memory Julia Jones cherishes of Watson is of a Christmas nearly 50 years ago when Watson visited Jones at the home she shared with her husband on a military base in Wichita Falls . "She drove in, took a look around, and she cut cedar boughs from nearby trees and very quickly made wreaths and garlands to decorate the house," Jones said. "Over the years Sister became so tender hearted. You could see it when she came across a baby bird out of its nest at the house on Houston Street ."
"She loved the doves in those trees," Corrigan recalled. "She coddled them and they would figure into her work. That house and its contents became a part of her life and art as well. She was dedicated to the beauty of that house and the meaning of it to her family and this city," he said, adding, "She absorbed everything. She was the sum total of everything she had experienced."
Corrigan marveled at the execution of some of the large pieces in the TAMIU exhibit. "You look at the saguaros and other of the pieces in the exhibit and you see she gave herself enormous challenges to build them. Some are very large, very entwined, very complex shapes. One of her most ambitious commissions was the seagulls she installed in the Nueces County Courthouse. It was a massive undertaking. She did that work here in Laredo . An architect named Nick Zacaratom reconfigured the hen house at the Richter home into a work area with a kiln. He also fashioned a dining room and a gallery with an impossible staircase. As unrealistic as the project seemed, it was seamless when it was finished."
"Helen's dear friend Marti Franco said that like many great artists Helen had the spirit and the mind of a little child who saw beautiful things," Keck recalled. "She saw shapes and possibilities without seeing the practical impediments to bringing something into being."
She was possessed of a charming sense of humor. Her work testifies to her great physical strength and energy as a younger woman. You can't handle that much wet clay and lug those enormous pieces around a studio if you are not quite strong and vigorous. It made me feel sad to see her tools stored and abandoned. I understood that Helen probably had not worked with her hands for some time and likely would not again. At my request on this day Helen dictated to me a list of equipment that a properly outfitted ceramics program should have. I was somewhat abashed to admit to her that while we had a large kiln, we had no other equipment nor any faculty to teach a ceramics program. She was somewhat taken aback at this but in a kindly tut-tutting way said, 'Well, you will in time, now here's what you need,' and she set down to business and I took notes.
--Janet Krueger
With Alma Haertlein, a visiting assistant professor at TAMIU and co-curator of the exhibit, Krueger visited Watson to firm up the list of pieces in the TAMIU show and to ascertain their correct titles for the catalogue. "We asked Helen what she would prefer to title the exhibit," Krueger recalled. "She thought a minute and smiled in what I can only characterize as mischievous and said, 'Oh, I don't know . . . how about "Destry Rides Again?' It was sort of a 'bada-BOOM!' moment. Neither Alma nor I was sure if she was serious or not. After a beat, she laughed at our earnest perplexity and said, 'No, I guess that won't do. . . .' I suppose a younger generation would not get the meaning of what I took to be her half-serious first choice -- not that it was of my generation either -- but as children we always understood 'Destry rides again!' as the cri de coeur of the comeback kid in any situation. I think that Helen knew this exhibition would be her last, but in the spirit of feisty resistance to the inevitable, she was determined to show that while she might have been down she was by no means out."
If the TAMIU retrospective exhibit is the short version of Helen Richter Watson's life, then the studio, her home, library, and the beautiful long room Meme Salinas built at 1906 Houston are the long version. Even the most brief tour of those rooms reveals a breathtaking archive of handmade clay objects in such a diversity of sizes, shapes, and glazes. And there are the notebooks of sketches, the correspondence of a lifetime, boxes of slides, a vast library of art books and magazines.
In our brief working relationship, Helen's persistence revealed to me a truth about being an artist. At no time in her life did Helen cease to be an artist, she did not turn down our invitation to exhibit her work, although her declining health would have been reason enough to defer. One week before she went into the hospital she was looking ahead to being honored with the first one-person exhibit to be held at the Texas A&M International Center for the Fine and Performing Arts Gallery. She was busily and joyfully contemplating sharing her art with her adoring Laredo audience.
--Janet Krueger
"I have a wonderful piece Whitey made," Corrigan said. "It's a wall hanging of birds clustered around a tree. It's impervious to the elements. And I have another, an early Whitey Watson, as she called it, of a ram's head. But what I really have of Whitey is a warehouse of memories," Corrigan said of his dear friend.
(The Helen Richter Watson retrospective remains on exhibit through April 8 at the TAMIU Center for the Fine and Performing Arts Art Gallery.)
