 BACKGROUND
Fine artist & sculptor James Hewes comes to art with a background in drafting, architecture and many years in construction, having executed a considerable amount of concrete form work on new high rises. He also assisted in setting up two fine art bronze foundries: one in Salt Lake City doing casting for the Boston Museum, and one in Sonoma, CA.
He studied traditional sculpture techniques at the University of Utah with the artist Carravaglia. Later, he had the opportunity to study sculpture with the avant-garde artist Marisol at Montana State University in Bozeman.
He finished his undergraduate degree at the California College of Arts and Crafts (Oakland, CA), studying glass with Marvin Lipovsky, as well as ceramics with Viola Frey, Dennis Gallagher and Art Nelson.
James began doing clay sculpture works in Sonoma while working in the bronze foundry. Upon moving to San Francisco in 1981, he continued working in clay at Fort Mason, and began developing his figure sculpture techniques. In 1982, he moved to the Goodman Building, a historic residential hotel in San Francisco, where he began the models for the geometric sculpture installation which evolved into the Tamarack Talisman twenty years later. He continues to experiment with various size sculpture installation versions of that original project, and also works increasingly with pared down, lyrical figurative sculpture, as well as abstract sculpture forms, creating fountains, birdbath sculptures, all of which amount to small and large sculpture installations.
In recent years he has also added video installation to his repertoire of experimental 3-D art projects. Though he did not benefit from formal video studies, James' enthusiasm for video art, especially when documenting his sculpture installations, and for filming local Montana wildlife is increasing with each passing year.
|
