Arty Farty Friday ~ Jim Warren

The name Jim Warren wasn't familiar to me, but while surfing TV channels, looking for something to watch, a piece of artwork painted on an old wooden door drew my attention. The owner was attempting to sell the piece to a pawn shop owner in the TV series Pawn Stars. The door was decorated with a portrait of Jim Morrison and several associated images, and signed "Jim Warren". An expert was in the midst of assisting the store owner to value the piece. He confirmed that it was genuine Jim Warren artwork, and the artist's original work these days commands high prices, at least in the tens+ of thousands of dollars. Those prices proved too rich for the store owner who declined to offer anything near what he seller was asking.


Later I did a bit of research on Jim Warren and his art.

Jim Warren was born on 24 November 1949 in Long Beach, California, is now based mainly in Florida. Amazingly, he is a self-taught artist, apart from his school art classes, and years of studying the work of famous artists exhibited in museums. He first became known for his artwork on record album covers, book covers, movie posters, and some portraits of well-known personalities. His album cover for Bob Seger's hit album Against the Wind won a Grammy Award in 1980 - he had arrived!

Warren works in oils using paintbrushes on stretched canvas. He eschews the airbrush beloved by so many of his contemporaries. His style has been described as "somewhere between Dali and Rockwell". I'd add to that: a touch of Magritte and a faint echo of Michael Parkes...surrealistic fantasy; rather surprisingly too, I also see in some of his work, a whisper of Thomas Kincade. Put that all together, though, and his paintings become pure Jim Warren.

In more recent years Warren has been concentrating on promoting environmental themes and issues, emphasising harmony and co-existence between man and nature. Warren's 1991 painting of Earth, Love It or Lose It was featured on posters, magazines, billboards, and T-shirts; and became an iconic visual representation of the global environmental movement. The original painting named "Oops" features a little girl standing on an image of the world that was also a balloon. The balloon had opened at the tie and looked to be whisking across the sky. The little girl in both he 1990 and 1991 depiction was Jim's niece Cristin. The original "Oops" had been painted from a photo Jim had taken when Cristin was about two years old looking at a bug. This was also made into posters and shirts and became the 1990 Earth Day poster for Nevada.

His book, The Art of Jim Warren: An American Original, was published in 1997, followed by Painted Worlds in 2002. A third book is scheduled to be released soon.

Jim Warren has said, "Each person sees something different in my paintings that relates specifically to them. That, to me is what art is all about."

His official website: http://jimwarren.com/

I don't intend to post a natal chart for Jim Warren, as he's still very much around, and would probably see it as an intrusion into his privacy. I'll just note that his Sun is in the very early degrees of philosophical Sagittarius and, depending on his exact time of birth, Moon would be either in early Aquarius or late Capricorn - I'd bet on early Aquarius, in sextile to his natal Sun; if this should be nearly correct, the sextile would, via two quincunx aspects, link to Uranus at the Yod's apex. Very appropriate!

This YouTube video showing some of his paintings is one of several available; lots of his work is featured on his own website, linked above, and on various other websites, easily found via Google.