Thursday, February 12, 2026
Jim and Pam and I were friends at The Art Institute of Chicago where we were students in the 1970s. Over time Pam and Jim became romantically involved and were inseparable. They were each brilliant in different ways. Jim had a great deal of natural facility and a touch in drawing and painting that can't be learned or taught and an intuitive sense of beauty, light and color that was apparent and impressed professors at the school right from the start. Pam had discipline, determination and the ability to unravel the complexities of drawing and painting with her keen analytical mind and by teaching herself to be an impressive realist painter. Jim and Pam were in constant dialogue about art and learned from each other. Pam was accepted to the Yale School of Art where Jim also attended a year later. I was accepted to Yale some years later where I was Jim's teaching assistant for an undergraduate class that he taught one summer. I learned so much from Jim in that class and in many subsequent conversations with him. Jim was a great painter and teacher and he was also a great and dear friend. Rita Ross
Jim's paintings will make you aware of the conversation happening between your mind and your eye. The mind identifies and names the objects and places in a painting and your eye sees things in a painting abstractly as shapes and blobs of colour without necessarily knowing what they are. You might see something that seems obvious in one of Jim's paintings only to have it become optically ambiguous so that you're not sure what's going on. Or you might be perplexed by a painting at first and only after looking for a while and relaxing your mind and eye will the situation become clear. The tension between what you think you know and what your eyes see is one reason Jim's paintings are so arresting.
Funny to hear how Jim loved driving fast. When I told him how I went zip lining for the first time while on a trip to Costa Rico, he said he wouldn't go zip lining if he were paid $10,000 dollars!
