James Doolin (June 28, 1932 – July 22, 2002) was an American painter and muralist best known for his saturated natural and urban southern California landscapes. Los Angeles artist and writer Doug Harvey notes that his paintings allow us "to see the places we overlook every day and to recognize that, in spite of its ominous industrial overtones, the city is shot through with a luminous, electric vitality and a psychological potency verging on the mythic." Described as a "master of color and composition," his "evocative, moody paintings teemed with life." Early life and education Doolin was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and moved with his parents and brother to the suburbs of Philadelphia when the artist was seven. The New England landscapes he encountered summering in Vermont would later prove influential in his work. During his primary school years, as the U.S. engaged in World War II, he became fixated with images of military hardware and battle scenes. As young as ten years old, the artist "worked through foreshortening issues" [with wing positions in aerial dogfight drawings] and "mastered the principles of perspective." Complex perspective would become a dominant motif throughout his career. His father, a successful insurance salesman, wanted his son to follow him in a business career, but in 1950, Doolin applied to the University of Vermont with the intention of pursuing a liberal arts education. However, a teacher encouraged him to apply to Philadelphia's University of the Arts and he was awarded a full scholarship. The University of the Arts "provided him with a strong foundation and a new attitude about the value of art" and he credited the school with fostering his individual style. Travel and influences The wide open spaces and vast scale Doolin encountered on a cross-country trip to the Rocky Mountains in his late teens opened the artist to new possibilities and experiences, and sparked three successive summers of hitchhiking excursions to Chicago and California, respectively. The latter two trips enabled him to assimilate both the natural beauty of Yosemite and the colorful and sometimes gritty cityscapes of San Francisco. In 1954, stationed in Germany with the U.S. Army, Doolin enjoyed his first taste of Europe. This included visits to Munich's Haus der Kunst and Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Discharged from the army in 1957, Doolin moved to New York and worked as a freelance commercial artist in advertising for the next four