James Westwater Acrylic and pencil on card, study for 'Bubbles', acrylic on raw linen 80" x 60".
James Westwater (b. 1962, Salvador, Brazil; lives in New York City and Beacon, NY) works primarily in painting and sculpture to investigate the liminal and the absolute. Much of his work incorporates a symmetrically placed oval motif that evokes heraldic iconography and references religious art.
Through the visual language of a recurring Hard-edge geometric shape and systematic composition, and his use of commonplace materials like bare plywood, along with old construction signs, postcards, paintings, and objects, he utilizes pictorial space and the built environment to mediate the familiar and the ineffable.
Before moving to New York in 2005, Westwater lived and worked in England, Portugal, Los Angeles, and New Mexico. He is a graduate of the UK's Ipswich Art School and Manchester Art College. In the US, at the Santa Fe Art Institute, he studied art with Richard Tuttle, Pat Steir, and Komar and Melamid, and critical writing with Peter Schjeldahl.
His paintings and sculptures were first shown in the late 1980s in Los Angeles and New Mexico. By the mid-1990s, he was being shown in New York and internationally. His work is in several permanent collections.