About
I’m James Honeycutt, a self-taught mixed-media artist living and working in beautiful San Diego, California.
I paint colorful landscapes, seascapes, cityscapes, and florals that highlight the awe, magic, and wonder of nature.
I love to tell stories with my art that are wistful, melancholy, and full of mystery.
In our busy lives we often miss the beauty of our natural surroundings. My goal is to bring the magic of nature to life in my work and make that available to you as custom art for your space.
How I make my art
The pieces that I paint are typically intuitive, meaning I don't know what I'm going to paint when I start the session. This practice allows my subconscious to bubble up and take form on the canvas as I work, resulting in more interesting and powerful artwork.
I start these intuitive sessions with complete freedom and abandon as I fill the canvas with paint. After a while, this process slows down and enters a more thoughtful "call and response" phase, where each new action is considered in relation to what's already there. During these intuitive sessions, the piece can move through many different incarnations, until it finally decides and tells me what it wants to be.
I will also occasionally paint a piece from a reference photo that I've taken. I like to take my mobile phone out on a photo safari and pick out fun and interesting ideas for future pieces.
My process is growing and improving all the time, but for the most part I paint with acrylic paint.
I like to paint on different substrates, including wood panel, canvas, and paper. Wood panel is my favorite because of its strength; it can stand up to heavy sanding and scraping. Canvas is nice because it doesn't require a frame.
But the approach I've enjoyed the most lately is painting a piece first on paper, then mounting that paper onto wood panel. Paper is significantly cheaper than wood or canvas, so I find that I can loosen up more on paper. Then when I complete the paper piece, I use gloss medium to adhere it to wood panel. (You can read more about that process here.)
I mostly like to paint on a large H-frame easel, in my studio. I occasionally paint outside (en plein air), but it can get a little too windy, so I prefer to capture reference photos with my phone while I'm out, then paint back at the studio.
My pieces tend to have lots of heavy texture, with ridges, grooves, scratches, and slightly messy edges. This texture builds as I add more layers of paint to a piece. The texture sometimes doesn't match up with the surface paint because it's coming from lower, non-visible layers. This gives the painting a sense of history, and even mystery, as lower layers impact and affect the higher, visible layers.
How I came to my art practice
I've always been creative, but I didn't discover that I was a painter until 2023, at the age of 57!
As a child I loved to draw and sing. I taught myself how to play piano. I even had a poem published in a national magazine.
Then around age 11 my folks sat me down to talk about getting better math and science grades. At that point, I set aside the magic of creativity and started focusing on math, science, and computers. I discovered software programming at age 16 and have been doing that as a career my entire adult life.
Throughout my life, creativity has been trying to surface here and there. I've continued playing piano almost daily. And my software career was in user interface, which is about the closest I could come to art in that field. I tried my hand at electronic music production, but didn't have the commitment to make that stick. So my underlying artistic purpose remained dormant, an unscratched itch.
Then in May 2023, I was at a Georgia O'Keefe exhibit at the San Diego Museum of Art when I was struck out of the blue. I started unexpectedly crying, because I was completely overcome by the knowledge that I am a painter. This was one of the most powerful moments in my life.
Since that day, I've felt like I'm in free fall. I've taken courses and workshops, read books, followed art podcasts, and have practiced painting almost every day since July 2023.
My first year I focused on learning all the basics. I painted around 150 paintings during that time, and I gave most of those away in order to get them to deserving homes.
After that strong beginning, I have the tools and knowledge I need to continue learning, growing, and producing more beautiful art for you to enjoy!