“James Watts does not fit comfortably into any corner of the contemporary art world, as his work at the Sandra Lee Gallery shows.  One moment he looks like an outsider or a tribal artist, the next like an abstract painter.

His "Sky Dancers" (2010), a wall assemblage built on scraps of driftwood, brings to mind Alexander Calder's "Constellation" (1943) in the Fisher Collection now on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art...

Watts' paintings, dominated by rust-colored pigments he describes as "oxidized paint," have a similar combination of manifest simplicity and eerie ambiguity. They look now like flat renderings of parts of his found wood sculpture, now like incipient nightmares of tree branches turning into talons or antlers.

Watts appears to seek, and occasionally finds, cruxes where disparate readings and cultural references unexpectedly meet.”

Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle, 9.11.2010