James Bama

A native New Yorker, James Bama creates photo-real figures and paintings that capture the old “wild west.”  He keeps a very tidy studio from where he converts his many photographs into paintings whose surfaces are so smooth and satiny that some people refer to him as the “Vermeer of the West” (McGarry 30).

He graduated from New York City’s High School of Music and Arts and then served in the military for three years. He attended the Art Students League and became a renowned illustrator in New York, working for Saturday Evening Post, Argosy, and Reader’s Digest. He also did over sixty book covers for Doc Savage books of Bantam Press.