James Owens Original Art

James Owens was born with gasoline in his veins.

Born and raised in Detroit MI, America’s rich history of the automobile runs deep in his family. “Half my family worked in the auto industry. Both my grandfathers worked in the industry. On my mother’s side, my grandfather went to work for Ford Motor Company in the 1920’s. My dad retired from Ford, my brother designs for General Motors and my cousins are employed by the big three.”

Jim earned his BFA in 1986 from The College for Creative Studies in Detroit MI. For nearly two decades he worked with some of the biggest ad agencies in the world creating story boards and finished illustrations for Ford, Chrysler, General Motors as well as AAA, Philips Electronics, Dupont, Home and Gardens Television and Dreamworks.

Although trained as a product illustrator, doing airbrushed cutaways of shock absorbers was not his idea of fun. “I prefer paintings that have some human element in them. I want to see the artists brush and choices on the canvas.”

Recent work has included a series of paintings combining his love for Cars and Film Noir. Full of dames that are sweet and deadly, and cars with big trunks, Jim refers to them as “Car-Noir”.

Today Jim works out of his studio in Southern California where the sun always shines, birds always sing and all the little hot-rodders are happy.

James is a huge inspiration for me being an artist also. I asked him if he would mind if I displayed his work on my blog and he said he thought that would be great! I’m honored to have his work on here and hope to be at his level someday myself. Take a look at some of his work below and also check out his website jamesowensstudio.com I have a few of these in my poolroom and everyone wants to know where they are from. Click on any of the images below to buy a print.

Thanks for the kickass artwork James!



This entry was posted on Friday, October 1st, 2010 at 3:13 am. It is filed under art and tagged with car-noir, cars and girls, hot rod, james owens, pinup. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.