Jim Lamb was born in Hamilton, Montana. His family later moved to the Seattle, WA area where he was raised. Both of his parents were creative people, and his father worked briefly as a free-lance illustrator during the late 1940's, but soon began a career as a draftsman and mechanical designer which lasted 30 years.

      Having parents who appreciated art and the beauty of nature instilled in Jim from an early age the desire to create artwork. Frequent family outings to the mountains and rural areas of the Northwest as well as annual summer trips to visit relatives in the Bitterroot Valley in western Montana contributed to his growing interest in the landscape around him. The family often made trips to the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, where Jim was exposed to the representational interpretations of many of the great German landscape painters of the past century. Their use of color and the handling of light intrigued the young artist and had a direct influence upon his interest in one day depicting the landscape in oil on canvas.

After four years of college and a four year stint in the Navy, Jim set out on his course to pursue art. He decided that trying to make a living as a fine artist would be too difficult in the Northwest, so he moved to the southern California area where he slowly began to build his reputation as a freelance illustrator, while taking courses at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles on the side. Over the next 15 years he developed a successful career working for many prestigious clients, including commissions from the Smithsonian Institution, the National Football League, and the U.S. Postal Service, as well as numerous leading movie studios, advertising agencies and national corporations.

      But Jim's long-held interest in the landscape remained with him over the years, and finally, about ten years ago, he made the decision to pursue, in his spare time, the painting of the landscape. An illustrator friend introduced him to Dan Pinkham, a very well-established plein air painter, who in turn, introduced Jim to the idea of plein air painting, a discipline relatively unfamiliar to him. Lamb's entire illustration career was built around working from photographs, and so the idea of working from life, with all of the challenges presented by nature made Jim realize that he was going to have to learn how to paint, and paint more rapidly. It was an awesome challenge. He took several workshops from some leading contemporary landscape painters, which proved to be invaluable in his desire to pursue the direct depiction of nature. Jim had been bitten by the "plein air bug" and was infected for life.

  Over the past fifteen years Jim Lamb's work has literally been seen around the world in the form of limited edition prints, collectible plates, greeting cards, puzzles, posters, apparel, postage stamps, sculptures, and many other forms.

     In 1991 Lamb was chosen Artist of the Year for the nationally recognized Southeastern Wildlife Exposition in Charleston, South Carolina. His work was also selected for the National Birds in Art Show which traveled to Japan and can be seen in North Light's book, The Best of Wildlife Art. The US Postal Service recently included Jim's work in a show at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts displaying the best of 40 years of US stamp designs, and the show is scheduled to travel to several other museum venues in the US. He is a member of the prestigious Northwest Rendezvous of Art group of artists, which holds it's annual show in August in Helena, MT., and his work was featured in the February 2001 issue of Southwest Art magazine.  Lamb has also exhibited his work at the historic Laguna Art Museum for it's annual Invitational Plein Air Painting Competition, held in July each year, as well as being featured with one man shows at his California galleries.

      Jim's work is currently represented by the Howard/Mandville Gallery, Kirkland, WA, the Red Piano Gallery and the Gallery at Palmetto Bluff, Hilton Head Island, SC. Jim Lamb's landscapes are being collected throughout the United States. He resides in the state of Washington with his artist wife, Cathy, and daughter, Lisa.  His other two children, Tim & Kristi are on their own and are artists in their own right.

Some of my biggest fans

PERSONAL STATEMENT ON PAINTING

       "Over the past several years I have been developing my own personal artistic expression in oils of the love I have for the landscape. These paintings are small works, done outdoors on location--PLEIN AIR. They are much freer and looser in style than the works I have done over the years as a freelance illustrator. Painting outdoors has brought a freshness and vitality to my painting. My use of color and design have improved and these paintings are probably the most honest and satisfying work I have created as an artist. In my landscape work , I do not want to paint every leaf or blade of grass... to copy Nature verbatim. I am not trying to "wow" the public with my technical ability. My goal is to create a mood or a feeling; to capture the essence of the landscape or light effect in front of me and somehow, as quickly and efficiently as I can, convey my impression and feeling about it through oil paint to the viewer. I want my audience to "feel the moment," to recall a time or place in their own experience when they were there too. If I can accomplish that, it gives me great pleasure and I feel that I have been successful in my expression of the thing.

  I'm not very philosophical about my work as an artist. Perhaps it is because I have produced so many different styles and subjects over the years as a freelance illustrator, that to become philosophical about it all now seems too contrived. However, my interest in the landscape and wildlife around me has existed for as long as I can remember. The things that most excite my creative instincts can be as simple as a warm evening light at the top of a tree, or a patch of snow that takes on an interesting shape. Those simplicities strike my fancy and I feel the need to somehow express them with a brush and some paint. Having done that, I suppose my only concern then is that others respond with some of the same appreciation I had for the subject when I was first touched by it myself. Sometimes I feel I succeed in reaching that end, other times I may fail, but nevertheless, those remain my goals each time I set out to create a piece of artwork. The more time I spend outdoors studying and painting from Nature, the more I am impressed with the infinite creativity of the Master Artist and His use of design, color, light, texture, and shapes. I have a lot to learn from His work and not much time to learn it."

-JIM LAMB-