James Cole Young

James Cole Young was known for his realistic landscape and sky paintings painted in a traditional manner by building up as many as twenty layers of paint to create the desired atmospheric effects. His work was included in the Burchfield Penney Art Center’s exhibition, New Territory: 11 Artists on Landscape, held November 16, 1996 through January 26, 1997. Those paintings were described by independent scholar, Janey L. Levy, Ph.D., as expressing “sensitivity to environmental concerns that are very much a part of late twentieth-century attitudes toward nature and our relationship with it. Young’s monumental paintings present pastoral scenes whose refinement, light, and color recall idyllic landscapes of the nineteenth century. American precedents can be found in the works of the painters of the Hudson River School and of the Luminists.” Young was a professor of visual art at St. Bonaventure University for twenty-five years, from 1977 through 2001, when he left to pursue painting in New York. He was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 1991.