A Rebellion in the Night
Picture a can of spray paint hissing in the silence of the night, colour exploding all at once across grey concrete. Street art: lawless, fast, rebellious and utterly free. Now picture the most disciplined craft in the world, obsessed with microns: Swiss watchmaking. What happens when these two extremes, these two opposite spirits, collide on a single wrist?
The answer is Christopher Ward's new creation: The Twelve Xander. The brand entrusted its skeletonized flagship, the Twelve X, to street artist Chris Alexander, better known as The Dial Artist, and gave him complete freedom. The result is a 150-piece limited edition, each one a unique explosion of colour. But this is not merely a colourful dial; the real story is hidden at the back of the watch, in a place no one had dared to go.
The Dial Artist: Chris Alexander
In a studio in Perth, Scotland, works a man nourished by graffiti and street art: Chris Alexander. In the watch world he is known as The Dial Artist, and he has become something of a cult figure through the colourful, hand-painted custom dials he has produced for projects such as IFL Watches. His aesthetic is a defiance carried from the concrete to the wrist.
Alexander describes his own work like this: It's meant to look chaotic. It's meant to look fast. It's meant to look as if I've just taken a paintbrush and splattered paint. Sounds simple, doesn't it? And that is precisely art's greatest illusion: the truth is the very opposite of that sentence.
The Perfect Canvas: The Twelve X
The canvas onto which this rebellion would be worked was no ordinary one. Christopher Ward's skeletonized flagship, the Twelve X (Ti), runs on the brand's in-house caliber CW-001 and is made of titanium. Its skeletonized architecture brings into the light the bridges, wheels and surfaces of the movement that normally stay hidden; in other words, it offers a canvas waiting to be painted. All Alexander had to do was bring his own chaos to this three-dimensional canvas. But the price of that chaos was far heavier than you would imagine.
900 Hours, 1,200 Parts: An Arithmetic of Patience
Usually, customization on a skeleton watch is confined to the front; at most a painted rotor is added, and that is all. Christopher Ward broke this convention: it gave Alexander the freedom to hand-paint eight different visible components of the movement, namely the bridges, the chapter ring, the oscillating weight (rotor) and more. And not for a single watch. The brand took those eight parts from all 150 calibers, one by one, and shipped them to the artist's studio in Perth.
Now let us do the arithmetic: eight parts times 150 watches equals more than 1,200 parts; add the components on the dial side and the number climbs past 1,300. Chris Alexander painted 1,200 individual parts, one by one, with his own hands, and it took a full 900 hours.
So why 900 hours? Because that seemingly random splatter is a sweet lie the eye tells itself. Every single part passes through multiple stages: first it is primed, then built up in layers with an airbrush, then hand-painted with a fine brush, and finally sealed and finished with lacquer. Even for a millimetric bridge or a tiny wheel, this cycle is repeated from start to finish. To put 1,200 parts through this multi-stage process is what gives birth to those 900 hours. Look through a loupe: every drop you thought was merely splattered is in fact the work of hair-splitting control. This is exactly what makes you say, what masters these are.
A Balance on a Knife's Edge: Painting a Working Movement
Here begins the truly hair-raising part. To paint a static dial is one thing; to paint functional, moving movement parts is another entirely. A bridge carries the pivots of the wheels; a chapter ring must align; an oscillating weight spins every second. The thickness of a single layer of paint applied to these parts can throw off tolerances at the micron level and bring the whole movement to a halt. What is more, this was the first time in Alexander's life that he had painted a movement part.
That is why the artist shipped the painted parts back to Christopher Ward's atelier in Biel, Switzerland. There, the watchmakers measured the tolerance of each part one by one, tested whether the paint affected the caliber's performance, and assembled the movement only after these checks. Art and engineering negotiated micron by micron here; chaos could be fitted inside a flawless chronometer only through such meticulous care.
The Identity of the Watch
The body carrying all this art is not to be underestimated either: an angular titanium case of 41 x 44.5 x 12.3 mm (Grade 2 for the mid-case and case back, Grade 5 for the bezel), with vertically brushed surfaces and polished chamfers. At its heart beats the brand's in-house caliber CW-001: 26 jewels, automatic (with manual winding and hacking seconds), 28,800 vibrations per hour (4 Hz), a 120-hour power reserve from two barrels side by side, and a COSC-certified chronometer accurate to just -4/+6 seconds per day.
Water resistance is 100 metres, and the case back is a sapphire display. Limited to 150 pieces, the collection is offered on a white integrated rubber strap or a Grade 2 titanium bracelet. In other words, before you stands both a work of art and a serious watch, built with a craftsmanship that challenges brands charging twice the price.
A Moment That Cannot Be Repeated 150 Times
The finest thing about the Twelve Xander is this: none of the 150 is identical to another. The same brush cannot make the same splash twice; each watch is the frozen form of an unrepeatable moment lived within those 900 hours. The rebellious spirit of the concrete and the micron discipline of Switzerland meet, for the first time, in so intimate an embrace.
Here we are not merely reviewing a watch; we are telling of an artist's battle of patience behind a loupe for 900 hours, of a dedication that descends into the finest vein of craft. And every time you glance at your wrist, in that explosion of colour you will see not only the time, but a passion that pushes the very limits of the human hand.