From teenage tears, a trendsetter

Published 7:00 pm Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Danna Watson defines her own artistic style.

Danna Watson’s influences were not the art masters, but came from mastering her identity.

One day in seventh grade, she was teased to the point of tears for daring to wear blue and turquoise clothes and took refuge in the girls’ bathroom. Her colors were too audacious for the conformist junior high schoolers.

“That was one of those defining moments,” Watson said. “After that, I said ‘If they are going to point out how different I am, I’ll be so different.”

She sewed her own clothes – a wild multitude of colors – through school, and soon other students were trying to copy her.

“Whatever was in fashion, I’d do the opposite,” Watson said.

If thin, narrow eyeglasses were in, she’d order large round ones. When curly hair was in, she wore hers perfectly straight.

“Today it means nothing, but then it was being a rebel,” she said.

The doll sculptures Watson has been making in her Fletcher Bay Studio for more than 30 years have taken up that baton of individuality. She will be showing their true colors during the Bainbridge Island Winter Studio Tour, which runs Dec. 2-4. Watson and her fantastical dolls – which have been on the studio tour the last 19 years – will be at Seabold Hall, one of nine stops on the self-guided tour featuring 60 artists.

Feathers, sequins or dense loops of ribbon become a fairy’s skirt, and near-iridescent faces of lions and monkeys are as brilliantly colored as their clothes, in a mix of patterns, textures and colors with ribbons and trim.

“I just want my pieces to always convey an image of hope and happiness,” Watson said. “I’m really into being positive. I think we have to keep that alive and that’s how I keep that alive.”

Watson makes the doll faces and hands from polymer clay and then coats them with multiple layers of gesso, acrylic paint and varnish. The bodies are made with wire and cloth; bamboo from her garden becomes the arms and legs. She sews each little shirt and pant on her sewing machine.

“All I ever loved to do was coloring, so I think of (dressing the dolls) as coloring,” Watson said.

Before she started making dolls, this child of the ’60s lived in a commune in Hawaii where people begged her to make Nehru shirts and flowery pants and skirts. Later, she sold pillows and clothes she made at Pike Place before the first Starbucks had even opened there.

Her first dolls were a Raggedy Ann and Andy for her sister, but since then, her dolls are as much “misfits” in the doll world as Watson was in junior high.

“They’re definitely that. They are obviously parts of me.”

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Tour d’art

The Bainbridge Island Studio Tour is Dec. 2-4 at nine locations around the island. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday. For more information and a map, see www.bistudiotour.com.