Richard “Ricky” Watts

Born 1980 in San Francisco, California.

Ricky Watts' obsession with creating began early. As a child, he loved cartoons and comic books, especially doodling his own. In school, he drew his peers' names in exchange for lunch money. High school was when Watts discovered the underground world of aerosol art. Fascinated with spray paint as a medium, he became fully engaged in creating elaborate pieces under the cover of night. After high school, he traveled up and down California painting large-scale pieces on every surface he could find.

Interested in expanding his skill set, Watts enrolled at the Advertising Arts College in San Diego in May of 2000 with an emphasis in graphic design. While working days in the design industry, Ricky focused on his fine art during off hours. In 2004, his debut solo exhibition "Spontaneous Combustion" opened in Petaluma, California. He flirted with multiple styles for a number of years before developing his current abstract style of hard-edge gradients. This came about in 2012, as a deconstruction of the typography forms he was producing on canvas. It was a lightbulb moment for Ricky and he put everything else on hold to follow the path of this new-formed style.

Today, Ricky’s colorful large-scale murals and intricate paintings on canvas can be found throughout the United States. His extensive client list includes major works for Google, Louis Vuitton and the Outside Lands Music Festival in San Francisco. Ricky Watts currently works out of his West Sonoma County studio and spends his “free time” raising energetic five-year-old twins.