James Strombotne

Art Brokerage: James S. Strombotne American Artist: b. 1934. Artist James S. Strombotne was born in Watertown, South Dakota, but was raised and educated in Southern California, receiving his Bachelor of Arts from Pomona College in 1956 and his Master of Fine Arts from the Claremont Graduate School in 1959. For over fifty years, James Strombotne has celebrated the human figure in paintings with luminous color, quirky humor, and an off-kilter sense of drama. A precocious talent, he won acclaim while still an undergraduate at Pomona College. In 1956, just after graduation, he was given a solo exhibition at Ed Kienholz's Coronet Louvre gallery. Strombotne participated in the 1960 and 1962 Whitney Annuals and the 1964 Carnegie International. His works from the 1960s were vibrant, boldly reductive narrative paintings addressing racism, Cold War paranoia, and the atrocities of war. Strombotne's 1991 estimation of himself "a romantic, a sensualist, a fabulist and a visionary artist" is of a piece with his statement to Time magazine in 1961, "What I want in my work is beauty, power, and mystery. Each word in capitals. Real beauty, real power-plus mystery. I want my pictures to be specific as hell, but enigmatic too." Listings Wanted