James Vaulkhard is a painter and sculptor based between the London and Kenya. He trained and taught as a portrait painter in Florence, Italy, and studied marble sculpture and the statutory arts under Jason Arkles but his landscape and cityscape painting has always been his own, and is a subject which has interested him from a very young age; a genre where he can experiment and express himself most freely. James was born in Kenya, and later moved to the UK to study History of Art at Leeds University and then fine art in Florence. He has produced work for private collectors, group and solo shows, and most recently he has produced a series of sculptures, in collaboration with Kenyan Kisi stone carvers, for Kericho cathedral in Western Kenya.
His work is ultimately representational and he works predominantly from life, but he plays around with texture, contrast and focus and develops an image which enhances reality. His paintings are painted mostly in oil, built up over hundreds of hours. Layers are built up slowly and scraped back or he etches into them using linoleum cutters and pallet knives before once again adding layers of fresh paint. This technique is repeated until he is satisfied that the atmosphere and emotion is expressed.
Although much of James's work has been traditional representational painting and sculpture, since his move to London he has adapted his work to include narrative and contemporary ideas as well as his sophisticated skill and draftsmanship he has spent years developing. Still figurative and representational of our rational material world, he hopes his work can transform the viewer into other consciousnesses by giving them a heightened visceral experience through his art. Apart from portraiture, which at its best penetrates the psyche of the sitter and portrays it to the viewer, most importantly James's work, both painting and sculpture, is the outcome of his spontaneous emotional response to a particular scene or scenario. His work does not follow a manifestation or set of rational ideas, his philosophy is unselfconscious. The result is that each of his works is quite unique.
"(His) paintings seek to evoke the soul; they transform the viewer. We are on a verge of a seismic shift in consciousness which will bring his work to the forefront of developments. " - George H Lewis.