You Had to Be There

You Had to Be There

Wyatt Waters' watercolor road trip through the American South

By Jordan LaHaye Fontenot

As watercolorist Wyatt Waters was reaching the end of his great Southern sojourn back in 2022, he found himself as South has South goes, painting palm trees in the Florida Keys.

These tropical beauties were so different from the lush, lace-leaved trees of the more quintessentially “Southern” places Waters was used to. When he returned to his home in Clinton, Mississippi some weeks later, he sat down before a loblolly, paintbrush in hand, and he looked at it anew.

“Travel, it changes me more than anything. It’s not something you can anticipate. When you get home, you find that you’re a different person. You’re looking at things differently, and for me, that means painting things differently.”

For his new book, The Watercolor Road: Painting and Writing through the American South, Waters approached his work as he always has: working on location, and attempting to capture the character of a place. He’s done this all over the world—when he set out for his book, he had just returned from a year spent in France, during which he created an impressive three hundred paintings.

But this time, his intentions were more specific: he wanted to better make sense of the places within the place he’d come from. He wanted to paint “The South”. “I wanted to pursue a more regional idea of what it means to be Southern,” he explained. “Painting is always how I’ve related to things … It’s a way to make some sense of them. You do this painting, and it does make sense, not in a logical way, but it puts it into a place where you can feel it and say something about it.”

Over the course of the years 2020 to 2022, Waters and his wife Kristi set out on a series of two-to-five-week trips from their home base of Clinton, where Waters’s gallery is. Traveling in their sixteen-foot Casita camper, they covered over 50,000-miles of the American South, capturing facets of it all the way: the stained glass of a church in Mississippi, a bridge over the Honey Island Swamp (which you’ll find on our cover), McClard’s BBQ in Hot Springs, mist settling over the farms of rural North Carolina.

“When you get there, that’s what makes the difference,” he said. In the second of the book’s twenty-one essays, Waters describes some people’s perplexity at watching him paint out in the snow, in temperatures so cold he has to use vodka to keep his paints from freezing. This degree of commitment stems from that firm gospel of “being there”.

“I believe now, more than ever, in the digital age where everything is given to you second- or third-hand, and can so easily be manipulated—there’s something very important about using brushes, pencils, and paper, and canvas. And being in front of your subjects firsthand, putting your boots to the ground, meeting people. I really believe that’s important.”

“Down to the Bayou to Pray” Pierre Part, Louisiana.

Wyatt Waters

His subjects present themselves in two ways, Waters explained. They are either chosen, often through research conducted by Kristi (his itinerary planner and the book’s editor), or they are chanced upon. “It was my job to, in between point A and point B, say ‘Oh hey, let’s stop and do that,’ and suddenly you’re painting this twenty-foot fiberglass cowgirl wearing a bikini,” he laughed. “You can’t anticipate those things, they just appear.”

Whenever he arrives on a site, Waters begins by simply walking around, exploring a little, seeking out idiosyncrasies and stories told by the passerby. “Those experiences, those stories, they somehow flavor the painting. I don’t really … I do this every day and I don’t even understand how that works. But it does work.”

After two years of traveling, what Waters ended up with were over one hundred expressions of over one hundred moments in over one hundred places. What he discovered, he said, was that there were so very many ways to be Southern—as many as the different varieties of barbecue. “And the best one is always whichever you are eating at that moment.”

Alongside these portraits of place, The Watercolor Road also includes Waters’s reflections on his own artistic practice, and how it is so inextricably entwined with the world he occupies. “That’s what it’s all about,” he said. “Life.”

You can see more of Waters’s work in his gallery in Clinton and online at wyattwaters.com, where you can also purchase a copy of The Watercolor Road: Painting and Writing through the American South.