Christopher Ward has teamed up with The Dial Artist (the artist also behind the Hands On Horology charity auction watches) to create a colourful and creative reimagining of their in-house Twelve X watch in an urban, graffiti style. It’s actually a departure from The Dial Artist’s usual projects because the Twelve X has a skeletonised display meaning there is no dial for him to paint. Instead, he has painted the movement directly for the first time. In celebration of this experimental partnership, the new watch is called the Christopher Ward Twelve Xander, because The Dial Artist’s real name is Chris Alexander.
The Xander is a riot of colour with shifting shades of purple, blue, red, orange, pink, green and every shade in between. While it looks chaotic, the paint had to be applied by Chris with deliberate precision because it is applied directly to the skeletonised movement components. An errant blob of paint in the wrong place could easily disrupt the chronometric performance of the watch so it was vitally important that The Dial Artist maintained the movement’s tolerances.
That means each of the 1,300 components that had to be painted for this collaboration were prepared, painted, and finished by hand in Chris’ Scottish workshop in Perth. There are no short cuts here and it took approximately 900 hours to complete the painting process. Once the parts were painted, they were then sent to Christopher Ward’s Biel atelier for assembly. Given the hand-painted nature of the movement, no two Christopher Ward Twelve Xanders are identical.
The movement that’s on display with its Dial Artist decoration is the CW-001, their in-house calibre with double barrel structure providing a power reserve of 120-hours. It operates at 4 Hz frequency and has an accuracy of -4/+6 seconds per day. As many surfaces as chronometrically possible have been decorated, including the automatic winding rotor that’s visible through the exhibition caseback.
For the case, this collaboration is based specifically on the Twelve X Ti, measuring 41mm in diameter and made from a combination of Grade 2 and 5 titanium. It is CW’s integrated bracelet design inspired by sports watches of the seventies and eighties with angular facets and a 12-sided bezel. It’s available on a choice of a titanium bracelet or a white rubber strap.
The Christopher Ward Twelve Xander is priced at £4,325 on strap and £4,710 on bracelet. It’s limited to 150 pieces but that almost feels like it undersells the collaboration given that each piece is functionally unique. It’s also extremely distinctive within the watch industry as a whole – I can’t think of any other watch with a hand-painted movement even within the prestigious halls of the Patek Philippe Rare Handcrafts or Vacheron Constantin Metiers d’Art.
Price and Specs:
More details at Christopher Ward.
