James Westwater Acrylic and pencil on card, study for 'Bubbles', acrylic on raw linen 80" x 60".
James Andrew Westwater was born in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil in 1962. At the age of four he saw Jackson Pollock’s paintings for the first time, at the Rio de Janeiro apartment of Pollock’s niece. The next day, when his parents weren’t looking, he crayoned his entire bedroom with abstract scribbles. Just as he could swim before he could walk, and speak Portuguese before he could speak English, Westwater was at first more interested in form and color than narrative content. Later, still not quite trusting the obvious, he chose Manchester, England instead of London for art school, and film, TV, and graphic design for his undergraduate studies.
After a decade of moving back and forth between Los Angeles, London, and Portugal, and doing a number of things in tandem with his art, from carpentry to art directing, Westwater finally settled in Santa Fe in 1994. In 1996, writing for Art in America, Aline Brandauer described one of Westwater's exhibitions as, "...like walking into a combination of an old-fashioned science museum and a funky county art fair.” Adding, "Exulting in the free play of his recycled signifiers, Westwater reminds us that smart art can also be fun art.” And in 2004, for the June/July issue of Art in America, Sarah King wrote, "Engaging metaphors for psychological struggles as well as plays on visual perceptions, these works subtly exploit the tension between impulse and reason at the core of Westwater’s work."
Although he has a tendency to resist established modes of art dissemination, in the past favoring eBay and TV Guide (when working at NBC), enough of Westwater’s work has found its way out of his Santa Fe and Los Angeles studios to be exhibited in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, and elsewhere in the US, Europe, and Japan, especially over the last decade. Westwater’s paintings and objects are held in numerous private and public collections. His favorites are Marcy and William Shatner, in Los Angeles; Pélé, in Brazil; Komar and Melamid in New York; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe.