Her most recent challenge was a portrayal of the Speedy Rolex Daytona 6239 “Paul Newman” Exotic Dial watch. “I rendered the entire piece with a motion blur, and it is one of the trickiest things I’ve ever drawn,” she says. The artwork required an incredible amount of “both focus and lack of focus, leaving me exhausted at the end of each day”. But the thrill, she says, is “figuring out how to do something I’ve never done before”. “Drawing is a process of learning how to see. And you never arrive, you just continue to improve. So much of drawing is not actually drawing; it’s pausing, stepping back, looking from different angles, making small corrections in assumption.”

While he was studying at art school, Van Heerebeek was deeply interested in art and watches, but “found it difficult to combine my two hobbies”. In 2014, he came up with the idea of creating “watch cartoons” and presented it to Europe-based watch magazine Fratello. “Robert-Jan Broer, the founder of Fratello, was immediately struck by the idea of creating cartoons of the world of watches—it didn’t exist at the time,” he says; at the time he was aware of only two other artists making watch art. “I thought the world of watches needed a more delightful or funny way of interacting with and talking about it.” His cartoon-esque interpretations of luxury watches often add a nod to current affairs and an element of surprise; “My inspiration comes from video games—particularly the older ones like Super Mario or Donkey Kong—and also [classic comic book] Tintin,” he says. In 2017, Van Heerebeek, who has a full-time job as a UX designer and whose Instagram handle is @watchesandpencils, became so popular that he started a side business to “open the doors to several watch brands” and become an independent watch artist.

Each artist adopts a similar artistic process when selecting their muse; it begins with a “deep dive”, studying the watch closely, looking at technical specifications, components and functions, then drawing the watch to scale before painting the intricate details. “I glean as much information as I can about a watch through conversation and research. All of these details roll around in my head, percolating, and they eventually distil into ideas,” says Kraulis.

When Lau first started making watch art, he worked on pencil sketches; he moved on to cardboard and acrylic paint, materials that “came to him naturally” as he had worked with them in his university days studying product development. “I use cardboard and Saran wrap; it’s not valuable, but then I wanted people to see that [my work is] art that encapsulates something expensive; it’s interesting because there can be value in something [that costs very little]; it’s just the way you look at it and how it’s interpreted.”

Van Heerebeek, who admits he sometimes struggles to simplify his ideas, approaches his watch art with industry news in mind. For instance, when the Omega and Swatch collaboration was announced, he started reading up on the MoonSwatch in greater detail. He thought it “sounded like a bit of a cash cow”, which led him to draw an imaginary Swatch x Willy Wonka collaboration: a melting chocolate “Swonka” watch. This sparked many conversations in the community. “People started to think about what would be next,” he says “Was creating the MoonSwatch a good move or a bad move?”. He believes his illustrations encourage “radical thinking which is out-of-the-box”, and urges watch fans to explore their interest beyond reading watch blogs.

So what do watch artists feel they can bring to the horological table and further enhance the experience of being a watch nerd? “My hope is that the artwork gives a new perspective on these objects of time [that] we love,” says Kraulis. “One of the key features of the [art] from the start was scale. When you play with size and the context of an object, you see things differently with fresh eyes.” She also believes there is a profound connection between art and time. “Watches symbolise so much—beauty through craftsmanship and engineering; objects documenting the most precious resource of time.”

Meanwhile, Lau made his art because it made him feel happy. “I was experiencing the real watch in my own way and then, just by happenstance, some people asked me if they could commission an art piece, [either] their watch, or their dream watch. And so I said, ‘Sure, why not?’ Because it makes me happy, so I’ll do it for you, and I sent it to them”.

Van Heerebeek has a similar impetus: “Watches should put a smile on your face from time to time, instead of [being thought of as] as mere economic investments ... Every watch has a unique face, but they all do the same—they tell time. One is more accurate than the other—but time is also something we cannot grasp. We cannot stop it. From an artistic point of view, that is very interesting.”

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