Artist Dale Watson in his painting studio.
Photo by Mic Smith
Dale Watson
Age: 67.
Resides in: Mount Pleasant.
Medium: Both digital and traditional, painting with oil, watercolor and acrylic and creating illustrations with a stylus on an iPad.
Horses and hands: He loves painting horses, which serves him well for historical scenes. Hands, he says, are the most challenging.
Hit the trail: Find Watson’s work at a battlefield near or far via thelibertytrail.org, american-revolution-experience.battlefields.org and dalewatsonart.com.
As a child, Dale Watson fidgeted in the church pew while his father preached. To settle him, his mother gave him a pencil and paper and encouraged him to draw. He would sketch Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, cowboys and Indians and soldiers—staples of a little boy's life in the early 1960s.
He parlayed that talent into a career in architectural drawing. But today, Watson stays busy with his side hustle, creating portraits and battle scenes to celebrate the nation's 250th anniversary. One of his artworks was even included in Ken Burns' recent docuseries, The American Revolution.
Watson's illustrations are on interpretive signs at Revolutionary War battlefields such as Camden, Eutaw Springs and Hanging Rock along South Carolina's Liberty Trail. The national American Battlefield Trust also pegged Watson to create illustrations for Kentucky, New Jersey, New York and Virginia.
"They said, 'We're going to keep you doing it until you don't want to do it anymore,'" Watson says.
He's been commissioned to create portraits of little-known Revolutionary War figures, including enslaved people, Native Americans and women, for a traveling exhibit, "The American Revolutionary Experience."
Painting isn't the only skill required for period pieces, Watson says. It also takes detective work, especially for details like a soldier's uniform. "Oh my gosh," he says. "You get one button wrong…"
And likenesses are challenging, as photography didn't exist in the 1700s, and the portraits that do exist were often painted late in the subject's life. "I have to 'young' them up," Watson says.
For Francis Marion, known as the "Swamp Fox," Watson relied on brief written descriptions and his imagination. The South Carolina Revolutionary hero was only 5-foot-2, bowlegged and homely, according to descriptions from the day. A historian joked that Marion might have resembled Klinger from the TV show M*A*S*H, Watson says, "so that's who I based him on."
Although technically retired, Watson still works on projects for architectural firms, but the historical paintings bring him the most joy.
"I get to do what I love to do," he says. "I also get to team up with all these brilliant historians. I'm just so excited about what I do, and I'm not sure that every 67-year-old can say that."