• ARTIST'S STATEMENT: Mind-Eye Magic
• BIOGRAPHY: A Winding Road To Painting
ARTIST'S STATEMENT: "Landscapes are my primary subject and painting with mind-eye magic is the goal. Our mind and eyes selectively ignore portions of what we see, isolating what catches our interest from the rest of what is in view. Interesting adjacent scenes remain 'in sight' in memory as we turn to survey a wide panoramic view. And yet, when the scene is reduced to a photograph, we can't seem to use this mind-eye magic. The mountains often lose their grandeur, power lines intrude, and wide expanses of uninteresting foreground or sky now stand out." "If the camera lens is zoomed in to flowers, distant mountains or a group of buildings, we loose the sense of place that the surroundings give to the selected subject. My objective is to build this mind-eye magic into my paintings; to capture some of what I am fooled into thinking I see, rather than the absolutes that come from a camera, and to do this while maintaining that sense of place. If someone familiar with the locale looks at one of my paintings and comments both that it's a nice painting and that they recognize the area represented, then in my view I will have made a successful painting."
BIOGRAPHY:
Jim Mossman was raised in Ramapo, NY and attended Middlebury College for two
years. He worked for the State of Vermont for thirty-eight years in the fields of highway
location and design, property appraisal, computer programming, systems analysis, and geographic information
systems (GIS). His time was also taken up with competitive shooting, house remodeling,
firewood cutting, square dancing, local elected service, bicycle time trials, and family.
While always having an interest, there were only occasional exposures to art during that time;
first a class at Suffern High School and years later intermittent workshops in Northfield, VT
with Bob Dikon, Rebecca Merrilees, and Kathy Ravenhorst-Adams followed by a Maine workshop with
Toni Van Hasslett & Judi Wagner.
Starting in 1997, Jim turned to graphic arts work weekends and nights to support GIS and
cartography at his day job. Recognizing that this work might benefit others as well, he
began making his graphic symbols available without charge to other GIS users. Working as
Data Deja View, he became the national leader in GIS symbol production. In 2007, when a
company purchased most of his symbols, well over 100,000 of these free sets had been downloaded.
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