Introducing Hillary Watson
“Stories provide connection. Connection to ourselves, to others, to the earth, even across space and time.”
Hillary Watson
Illustrator + Editor
I think I’d be lying if I tried to frame this introduction as anything other than a love story, so here goes:
We matched on Bumble. Call it fate…if you’re tacky and comfortable giving that kind of philosophical cred to a geo-location-based matching algorithm. Anyway.
We met, hit it off conversationally, started hanging out every week or two, going for walks and just talking. We were friends for a few months. Then, we became more than friends and that evolved slowly at first, and then as it often goes, much faster.
I can’t say I imagined us working together until much more recently, as we started editing each other’s writing, and doing more arts and crafts.
It didn’t take long for us to start fostering the creator in each other. I fell in love with our ability to collaborate and I wanted more of it. Hillary introduced me to new worlds through her music and her career with The Pairs, inviting me on tours and to attend festivals with her. She and her bandmates showed me a different way to work. And more profoundly, a different way to work together — an inclusive way of fostering ideas and making decisions.
Ideas are funny things. Sometimes triggered and sometimes just wafting in and taking shape from the ethers, you don’t know their absence until their presence. And then they’re there. If you feed them, they tend to grow. They become realities.
Today, Hillary and I are creating something real. Little by little. A cumulative process, with patience and acceptance fundamental parts of the act. Overnight success is the true illusion. It takes consistency. The best things grow, they live a full life, they take time.
We are taking our time. Together we are thinking and forming. We are, slowly but surely, making it — both literally and figuratively.
Hillary is a singer-songwriter, illustrator, tattoo artist, and multi-disciplinary creative. She is a classically trained musician and a member of the London-based 3-part harmony folk group, The Pairs.
In her illustration, Hillary incorporates varied mediums, including writing, drawing, collage, watercolour, and photography. She is influenced by her mother, a piano teacher, her father, a surrealist painter and visual artist, and by time spent as crew on anti-whaling vessels patrolling the Southern Ocean. Her love of art and music were fostered early, over kitchen table drawing lessons and through play, song, and dance.
If you want to learn more about Hillary, see her music through The Pairs, or find her on Instagram at @hillarywatsonmusic.
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