James Keul is an artist, currently living in Brooklyn, New York, who has spent the past eleven years of his life dedicated fully to the production and exhibition of his artwork. He was born in Oakland, California in 1980, and, after living in Connecticut for some time, he moved back to the Bay area with his family where he grew up in Albany, California. At the age of 16, James moved to the island of Western Samoa for one year of high school, where he was exposed to fa'a Samoa, or the 'Samoan way', which became hugely influential on both his life and his artwork. The great respect that the people of Samoa have for each other and the land, ultimately changed the way James viewed the world, and the paintings that he began doing in Samoa, and in the United States upon his return, reflect his experiences there. Mankind's relationship with nature has been a constant theme in all of James's work and the respect that he learned there for traditions and the passing down of knowledge, has led him to pursue a traditional education in painting, where a similar respect can be found for those who came before us. In the fall of 1997, James moved to St. Johnsbury, Vermont, where he attended the St. Johnsbury Academy for two years. In Vermont, he met an artist named Bill Darling, who was able to offer him just this kind of traditional approach he was seeking. James studied with Darling until 1999 at which point, at the suggestion of Darling, James attended a landscape course with the artist Frank Mason, with whom Bill Darling himself had studied thirty years earlier. James later went on to take Frank Mason's landscape course for three more summers. James took one year off from school before attending university at the Savannah College of Art and Design, which he spent traveling in South-east Asia, Europe, and Alaska. When he did begin his studies in Savannah, he was already a well seasoned landscape painter and he hit the ground running, being asked to take part in a project where he painted watercolors of interiors of Savannah homes and gardens for a book that was to be published through the College. In 2003, James attended a study abroad program in Lacoste, France, where he continued painting landscapes and where he had his first major solo exhibition. In 2004, after graduating cum laude from The Savannah College of Art and Design with a B.F.A in painting, James moved to New York to study at the Art Students League, under Frank Mason. Here he expanded his oeuvre by learning how to paint portraits and figures. After one year at the Art Students League, James received a scholarship to study at the Ecole de Marchutz in Aix-en-Provence, France. He attended school there for six weeks, painting the landscape made famous by Cezanne a hundred years earlier. He also was awarded a merit scholarship by the Art Students League, which entitled him to one free class for a year. In 2006, James became the head monitor for Frank Mason's class in New York, a post which he as held for the past two years.