Painterly in style, James’ art transcends the parameters of Pop Art. Described by the late art scholar William Seitz as an ‘incisive and startling commentator’ whose art is ‘timeless and universal’, he merges iconography with startling colour. His separations of light and shadow – typical of news photographs – are inspired by magazines like Time, Life and National Geographic – with the latter printing its first-ever natural colour photographs in July 1914. As a child, he was gifted a collection of issues by a colleague of his father, which sparked a lifelong passion for imagery. In her 1966 book, Pop Art , Lucy Lippard notes that: ‘Often he mimics the effects of excerpted frames from a film strip, or fixes a transient television
image’, while the photographer Van Deren Coke remarked that the cut-off format of many of James’ artworks owes its origin to camera-vision. Working with montage effects – which he terms metamage – James has experimented with techniques including stone lithography, intaglio printmaking, woodcuts and etching. As a jazz aficionado in the 1960s, he was also influenced by music – going on to capture The Doors’ lead singer, Jim Morrison, and the Beatles. The rise of the automobile industry also sparked a sense of artistic freedom – especially in Southern California, where cars became a symbol of exploring new worlds.
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