Watches and Art: Not just a pretty face

A bottle of Evian and a half-full glass of water sit on a clean, white table that has a white office chair pulled up to it. In front of the water and Evian bottle are two pills - one red, one blue - and next to them, a Panerai watch.

This isn’t the suicide tableau of a watch geek, but a 2008 installation by Damien Hirst called Killing Time, part of the Beautiful Inside My Head Forever collection, which was auctioned on September 15 and 16, 2010.

This was not the first time Hirst had used a Panerai watch in his artwork. One was painted next to a skull in 2005’s Skull with Watch, and one was also present in the 2006 installation The Tranquillity of Solitude (for George Dyer).

So it wasn’t surprising that, when Panerai sponsored the O’Clock – Time Design, Design Time exhibition at the Triennale di Milano design museum, Hirst premiered two works featuring the brand’s dials, titled Beautiful Sunflower Panerai Painting and Beautiful Fractional Sunflower Panerai Painting. “I love Panerai,” says Hirst. “The watches are timeless and I made this spin painting using black Panerai watch faces without the hands in the pattern of the seeds in the head of a sunflower. I hope the painting makes you think we are here for a good time, not a long time.”

Hirst’s brand association may seem like further evidence of his capitalist leanings, but he is not the only artist aligning himself with watch brands.

However, the latest art/watch pairings are far more interesting. Rather than incorporating the watch into the canvas, the watch dial itself is the canvas.

Turn back the clock
Despite a recent interest in art on watch dials, this is not a new phenomenon, though one that has been out of fashion for a little while.

The 17th century was a boom time for enamel-painted pocket watch dials. Jean Petitot, who was born in Geneva in 1607, was considered, along with goldsmith Pierre Bordier, to whom Petitot was apprenticed, to be one of the first watch dial artists.

Petitot’s son, Jean Petitot II, also became an enamellist, and in the 17th and 18th century there were the Huaud brothers, whose father, Pierre, is believed to have invented the cloisonné technique used on watches. It was largely thanks to the brothers in particular that Geneva enjoyed a boom in watch decoration.

However, this art started to decline in the late 18th and 19th century.

“The art continued during the 19th century, but during the previous century the pocket watch was no longer this exclusive object it used to be,” says Gauthier de Salis, a guide at the Musee International d’horlogerie in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. “But the real reason why that art of decoration almost disappeared has to do with the invention of wristwatches, which replaced pocket watches within a few decades.”

Although the enamel industry has not reached the prominence it had in the 17th and 18th centuries, there are artists around now working with watch brands. Anita Porchet, who works out of a converted farmhouse in the village of Corcelles-le-Jorat, near Lausanne in Switzerland, does intricate enamel dials for brands such as Van Cleef & Arpels, Vacheron Constantin and Parmigiani. Cartier and Jaeger-LeCoultre have their own established in-house enamelling workshops.

New breed
However, it is not enamellers that some brands are looking to for their dial art, but rock stars and tattoo artists.

Crispin Jones, founder of Mr Jones Watches, which has a store in London’s Oxo Tower Wharf, called upon the services of British tattooist Adrian Willard from Brighton tattoo parlour Magnum Opus to design the dial for the limited-edition run of the brand’s The Last Laugh watch.

“I was thinking about different skull artwork that we might be able to use as a variation on our existing Last Laugh design,” says Jones.

“I thought a tattoo artist would bring a different aesthetic to the project.”

To find his man, Jones went in search of the artist behind David Beckham’s tattoos, “the most famous tattoo I could think of off the top of my head”, he says.

This led him to a television show called London Ink and from there to Magnum Opus and Adrian Willard. And then the fun began. “One of the main problems was running the design part of the project over email. I realise this is quite alien for a tattoo artist who always works face-to-face with their client.”

Eventually a design that was inspired by the skulls associated with the Mexican Day of the Dead festival was decided upon, both for its popularity in the tattoo world and also because of ‘memento mori’ connotations. The Latin phrase means remember your mortality.

Then there were challenges with replicating the colours on the dial.

“The watch glass is pad-printed, so there is not a way to do smooth gradient tones, normally a feature of tattoo work.

We had to block in some of the colour but because the design was being scaled down in size this wasn’t particularly noticeable,” says Jones. Added to that
the design needed seven colours rather than the usual two or three to do the artwork justice.

Painting by numbers
It wasn’t scale but rather the furniture of a dial that caused a few problems when Rolling Stone and artist Ronnie Wood was asked to put his artwork on
Bremont’s B1 Marine Clock.

“We were introduced to Ronnie through a third-party at a time when his management was looking for a potential watch partner,” explains Giles English, co-founder of Bremont, along with his brother Nick. “At the time we were not really interested in having one of the watches painted but the B1 Marine Clock seemed like a perfect alternative.

“Ronnie began the creative process by roughing out the design for the clock on his sketch pad and then taking a deep breath before applying it to the clock. He found it quite a challenge to integrate the numerals on the face within the painting and also design the image so that it extended out on to the case. But the result looks fantastic.”

It was a challenge that Wood was happy to accept. “I am always looking at pushing myself art wise,” says Wood. “I do a lot of iPhone art, for example - where a drawing is done on an iPhone and then blown up and printed onto a canvas and then finished with oils and acrylics - and this is a wonderful change for me. I wanted to do something very British and when I first met up with Nick and Giles it just clicked.”  

The Wood/Bremont partnership isn’t a one-off; Wood will create 14 clocks in total. Each will be hand-painted by Wood and depict a different period in his life.
When it comes to getting creative with dials, the watch world may not have reached the heights of 17th century Geneva, but hopefully new dial artists will inspire more brands to create timepieces that look as good on the outside as they do underneath the case back. After all, beauty doesn’t just come from the inside.

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