Jim Lamb was born in Hamilton, Montana. His family later moved to the Seattle, WA area where he was raised. Both of his parents were creative people, and his father worked briefly as a free-lance illustrator during the late 1940¹s, but soon began a career as a draftsman and mechanical designer which lasted 30 years.

Having parents who appreciated art and the beauty of nature instilled in Jim from an early age the desire to create artwork. Frequent family outings to the mountains and rural areas of the Northwest as well as annual summer trips to visit relatives in the Bitteroot Valley in western Montana contributed to his growing interest in the landscape around him. The family often made trips to the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, where Jim was exposed to the representational interpretations of many of the great German landscape painters of the past century. Their use of color and the handling of light intrigued the young artist and had a direct influence upon his interest in one day depicting the landscape in oil on canvas.

After four years of college and a four year stint in the Navy, Jim set out on his course to pursue art. He decided that trying to make a living as a fine artist would be too difficult in the Northwest, so he moved to the southern California area where he slowly began to build his reputation as a free-lance illustrator, while taking courses at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles on the side. Over the next 15 years he developed a successful career, working for many prestigious clients, including commissions from the Smithsonian Institution, the National Football League, and the U.S. Postal Service, as well as numerous leading movie studios, advertising agencies and national corporations.

But Jim¹s long-held interest in the landscape remained with him over the years, and finally, about ten years ago, he made the decision to pursue, in his spare time, the painting of the landscape. An illustrator friend introduced him to Dan Pinkham, a very well-established plein air painter, who in turn, introduced Jim to the idea of plein air painting, a discipline relatively unfamiliar to him. Lamb¹s entire illustration career was built around working from photographs, and so the idea of working from life, with all of the challenges presented by nature made Jim realize that he was going to have to learn how to paint, and paint more rapidly. It was an awesome challenge. He took several workshops from some leading contemporary landscape painters, which proved to be invaluable in his desire to pursue the direct depiction of nature. Jim had been bitten by the ³plein air bug² and was infected for life.

Over the past fifteen years Jim Lamb¹s work has literally been seen around the world in the form of limited edition prints, collectible plates, greeting cards, puzzles, posters, apparel, postage stamps, sculptures, and many other forms.

In 1991 Lamb was chosen Artist of the Year for the nationally known Southeastern Wildlife Exposition in Charleston, South Carolina. His work was also selected for the National Birds in Art Show which traveled to Japan and can be seen in North Light¹s book, The Best of Wildlife. The US Postal Service recently included Jim¹s work in a show at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts displaying the best of 40 years of US stamp designs, and the show is scheduled to travel to several
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other museum venues in the U.S. He recently was honored with a one-man show in conjunction with a collection of deceased painters of the American Landscape from the turn of the century at the Red Piano Gallery in Hilton Head, SC. Jim is a painting member of the California Art Club as well as a new member of the prestigious Northwest Rendezvous Group of painters, which holds it¹s annual show in August in Helena, MT., and his work was featured in the February 2001 issue of Southwest Art magazine. He has also exhibited his work at the historic Laguna Art Museum for it¹s annual Invitational Plein Air Painting Competition, held in July each year, as well as being an award winner in the past two La Quinta Arts Foundation¹s invitational plein air painting competitions in La Quinta, CA. Jim also regularly displays his work annually at the Wild Wings Fall Festival in Lake City, MN.

Represented currently by the Howard Mandville Gallery, Kirkland, WA, the Red Piano Gallery, Hilton Head Island, SC and the Kootenai Galleries in Big Fork, MT., Jim Lamb¹s landscapes are being collected throughout the United States.