Art, a noted non-Philistine once articulated, has the capacity to make us nervous. Now, meet Colton Batts, whose art can make one, if not nervous, a little uncertain about his surroundings.
“It almost looks like it has this Colton Batts’ filter over the world,” says Jay Wilkinson, a celebrated oil painter in Fort Worth and friend of Batts. “It’s pretty and dark with deep meaning and distant and spooky. It’s cool. It’s great.”
Batts was formally introduced to Fort Worth’s art society during a monthlong show, “After Hours,” at Wilkinson’s Dang Good Candy in downtown’s Sundance Square, which featured his absolutely spectacular photography and digital editing skills that enable him to enhance what the camera sees.
On display were his photos of Fort Worth after dark, which featured the town in foggy mornings and foggy nights. Along with them is an accompanying eerie feeling that Freddy Krueger lurks.
The show was a hit. Batts, a connoisseur of the “darker aesthetics,” says he sold 75% – 80% of his inventory there and has had collectors on the phone since. He added that Simon Sinek, the British-American author and inspirational speaker, has inquired about his services. Not bad for a guy who discovered this only five or so years ago, a self-taught endeavor that he has literally made an art form.
It’s not as if this has come completely out of the blue. Batts, 37, who was raised in Richland Hills and went to Birdville High School was, he says, “an artist always, super into art in school.”
“Honestly,” says Wilkinson, who grew up with Batts at Birdville, “he has always been a talented dude, but it’s only been in the last four or five years that he really pushed himself into being an artist. I’ve been a painter forever … and he was like, ‘I’m gonna, I’m gonna.’ And then he just did. He’s got a really unique voice. He just came up quicky and powerfully. It’s really unique, it’s really him, and I love it.”
Batts used Stephen King, the master of the horror fiction genre, as inspiration to get out and work at it. In King’s On Writing, Batts says, the author tutors would-be artists on what it takes to be a successful artist.
Go out there, even when you don’t feel like it and do your art.
To that end, Batts published a photo a day on Instagram for a year, an endeavor that really acted as a “springboard for my art, just making myself do it every day.”
It was as a graphic artist that Batts uncovered this interest. He rarely liked any of the stock photo options in front of him, so he would do the photography himself.
“I would shoot my own assets,” he says. “That turned into, ‘I’m going to teach myself photography.’ And that became a love affair with light. I’m obsessed with light.”
Batts has progressed from “spraying and praying,” as he puts it, to working with knowledge and purpose every time he activates the shutter. Initially, he would go out and shoot 500 pictures at a time.
“Now I’ll come back with 10 shots I made,” Batts says. “It has just become more intentional. I’m not trying to spray and pray. I’ve got a pretty good idea of what I want to do. I tell new artists that you need to shoot 10,000 photos and edit them before you can even start to be like, ‘OK, this is what I like even.’ Initially, it was trying to see what works.”
He’s currently working on a new collection, “Southern Gospel,” consisting of Southern religious iconography, such as old churches with some magical realism, he says.
“It’s really an aesthetic that I like,” says Batts, recently married to the former Kait Rhone, who is an embroidery artist. “I’ve always been drawn to religious aesthetics, like Masons, secret societies. I love that cultist iconography. It’s not like my belief system, just the general visual aesthetic that I love.”
Batts’ odyssey to the present took a winding pathway all the way to The City That Never Sleeps.
To earn his keep and pay his electric bill and those kinds of incidentals, he worked for an indie film production company, Killer Films, doing film sets, props, and set dressings.
“Things like that,” he says reminiscing. He knew some people in the industry and “just kind of lucked into the job.”
His closest brush with Hollywood stardom was 2007’s “Then She Found Me,” tarring Helen Hunt, who also produced and directed the film.” Matthew Broderick and Colin Firth co-starred, and Bette Midler had a role, as well.
In the film, April Epner (Hunt) finds herself at a crossroads when the wheels come off her life.
Fast-forward a few years, and you’ll discover some irony. Batts confronted a life-changing event of his own when one night about 10 years ago his Brooklyn apartment building burned to the ground. His possessions went poof into the night air of New York. He had no money and, most importantly, he had no renter’s insurance.
“I said, ‘You know what? I’m going to go home,’” he says.
Perhaps the event was serendipity or fate. Who really knows? But back in Fort Worth, Batts found something.
The light.
