Jim was raised in Warrensburg, MO, and was a 1976 graduate of Warrensburg High School. He attended the Hollywood Art Center School, as well as the Paris American Academy of Art. Jim was a prolific and talented artist known for his painting and sculptures. His work was primarily mixed media using a wide variety of materials from driftwood to bronze to plastic toys. He showed and won recognition in regional as well as international art fairs. 

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Although Jim’s work is based in a classically trained foundation, he scoffed at efforts to categorize it or fit it into one conceptual or aesthetic movement or another. For him, it was about exploring color, texture and materials resulting in varied manifestations of subjects he found most interesting in life: women, animals, cars, music, rebellious historical figures, the ocean and certain landscapes.  He thoroughly believed in a democracy of art and media. He assigned as much value to the design of the packaging on a child’s toy as to Gauguin’s color palette. Similarly, he was as likely to use pipe cleaners as oil paint. 

 

Because of this approach, his work has sometimes been mis-categorized as naïve or outsider. Naïve he was not, outsider – perhaps, but not by the definitions of the art world. Regardless of labels, his mastery of storytelling is undeniable. A piece of drift wood becomes a dancing bull playing a fish as a flute – a vision straight out of his personally imagined mythologies – alive with movement and music, glowing with neon colors. One wonders if you could peer into his mind, would you see a vast world as detailed as Darger, replete with surfing deer, reclining women, and Che Guevaras frolicking in a socialist utopia? 

 

Jim lived a charmed life. He was well aware of this, and as though making up for a past life of toil and trouble, he took advantage of every moment to make art and enjoy, sometimes to excess, life’s vices. He was prolific in output, gifting us with pieces ranging from 12 inch ceramic tiles to 12 foot tall concrete figures. 

 

Jim’s insistence that he made each work because it was “cool” was infuriating in its clear falsehood. This was an intelligent, well-read, and well-traveled man who was holding the commercial art world at bay so that he could make work as he pleased and keep it pure of expectations. Although the proverbial “knocks at the door” were frequent, he largely refused these advances only selling, trading or gifting to people he knew and respected.