James Doolin United States, Australia, 1932-2002

James Doolin was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1932. He won a full scholarship to attend Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, after which he was drafted into the US Army, based in Europe where he travelled and visited galleries. He moved to Melbourne in 1965 with his new Australian wife and taught at Prahran Technical College. In 1967, he was accepted into the graduate program at UCLA to study a Master of Fine Arts and after graduating in 1971, he joined the UCLA faculty. In 1978, Doolin returned briefly to Australia for three months as visiting artist at The Victorian College of the Arts. In 1980, after being awarded a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship to paint desert landscapes, and following the breakdown of his marriage, he moved to the Mojave Desert, where he lived very simply for three years. On his return to Los Angeles in 1983, he became an art instructor at Santa Monica College and he continued to paint and work in Los Angeles until his death in 2002. His first exhibition was in New York in 1964 and then in Melbourne in 1966 and in Sydney the following year. He continued exhibiting in Australia in the 1960s and in the United States from the 1970s until his death.

We have records of art auction sales by James Doolin from 1975 and in total 8 works by the artist have been offered for sale, of which 5 (63%) were sold. The highest price recorded for the artist is $12,650 for Artificial Landscape sold by Christies in October 1994. No works have been offered for sale this year, and the last sale we have recorded for the artist was in 2020. Works by James Doolin are held by the Art Gallery of NSW, National Gallery of Australia and a further two major public national galleries (see list below).