A Man With True Grit

I’m an artist and educator, Pennsylvania born and bred. After completing two fine art degrees from Kutztown University, I’ve taken up residence at the Goggleworks Center for the Arts.

I’m an award winning and nationally published artist.

In recent watercolor works, I have employed the visual language of entropy and abandonment to discuss shifts in economy and industry while also developing a metaphor that helps to ask questions and make statements about the metaphysical realm.

The apparent struggle between the natural and synthetic worlds has long been the subject of painters and photographers alike. I intend that the rusted, crumbling objects and spaces that I chose to paint stand as monuments, not to human ingenuity, but as documentation of the process by which the remnants of industry and invention often fade. I offer gentle reminders that nothing of this world truly lasts-no human innovations, inventions, nor material aspirations. In the processes of oxidation and decomposition, human imposed “order” tends toward the apparent disarray of natural order, and it is here that I’ve encountered captivating beauty. I propose that these images bear witness to the simultaneously destructive and restorative essence of that struggle.

I use titles and iconographic conventions borrowed from historical Christian art to reinforce the subtle, overarching spiritual themes of my work that are otherwise layered in metaphor. Through these channels I make queries about human plans as they may relate to a Divine, permissive will.

- James Maria