James Welling
b. 1951
James Welling was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1951. He grew up in nearby Simsbury where, in 1963, he began to study art with Julie Post. In 1965 he took drawing classes at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford and began to work independently in watercolor. Welling was deeply influenced by the work of Charles Burchfield, Edward Hopper and most importantly by Andrew Wyeth. In 1968 Welling studied with Estelle Coniff at the West Hartford Art League, and frequently visited the Wadsworth Atheneum, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, as well as galleries and museums in New York. From 1969 to 1971 Welling attended Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he studied with Gandy Brodie, John Stevenson, Connie Fox and Robert Tharsing. In the fall of 1970, he began a series of gray monochrome paintings, as well as a group of outdoor site-specific sculptures influenced by Post-Minimalism. At this time he also made his first black-and-white photographs, night exposures of Pittsburgh. In 1971 Welling transferred to the recently formed California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. At CalArts, he worked primarily in video and studied wit…
Films