Virtual Art Tour

James Michaels, American, Born 1945

The American West

Baloney & Fries

The Bold and the Beautiful

Boy's Life

Crazier than Vincent

A Dog's Best Friend

Madonna with Roses

Snap-Crackle-Pop

Soup

The Stoning of St. Stephen

Superman Anthology

Tally Ho

Born in Brooklyn, James Michaels moved to the Tampa Bay area in 1971. In 1980, Michaels gave up a successful commercial art career to pursue a career in the fine arts.

His early paintings were classically realistic subjects, Native Americans and wildlife. But Michaels didn't feel challenged by them. It came too easy. Technically skilled, but needing to get in touch with his feelings, Michaels gave up the paintbrush and used his fingers to paint directly on the canvas. This exercise was a revelation and he no longer felt constrained to any preconceived notions of what painting should be.

In 1981, armed with paintings he really wanted to paint, in a style which began to show his emotions and insight as well as technical mastery, he started to win awards for his work. This culminated in 1986 with a national level fellowship, the AVA (Awards in the Visual Arts), which included a large cash prize and traveling exhibitions in New York, Cincinnati and California. In 1987, back problems seriously curtailed his painting production. After recovering, Michaels' work evolved into a more contemplative self-examining expressionistic approach. That style of painting led to a Gasparilla Best of Show award in 1990 and a one person show at the Tampa Museum of Art in 1992. In 1994, Michaels won a State of Florida Fellowship in painting.

In "The Stoning of St. Stephen" Michaels has gone back to a more realistic style of painting. His subject matter is a modern depiction of the biblical story. From March 1997 through September 1998, this painting was part of a traveling exhibition titled "Body and Soul Contemporary Southern Figures." It was shown in the Columbus Museum in Columbus, Ga., the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson, the Mobile Museum of Art in Mobile and the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens in Jacksonville, Fla. For the show catalog Michaels stated, "'The Stoning of St. Stephen' is one of a series of life-size figurative works I started in 1988," Michaels explains. "The paintings were inspired in part by the masters of the 16th and 17th centuries. In this work I wanted to present a drama, as if on stage, that moment just before St. Stephen's martyrdom. The actors frozen in time, they are posturing, gesturing, playing up to an audience (us), which gives the work, I believe, a chilling contemporary effect."