James H Soul

James H Soul

Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

About James H Soul

Visit: www.jameshsoul.wix.com/photo James H. Soul (1970) doesn’t like talking about his life; it makes him feel uncomfortable and he eludes questions on the subject by cracking the odd joke or making some remark that is probably true. Born to a Dutch mother and an unknown father, James travelled a lot during his childhood together with his siblings and parents. Rumour has it or at least I’ve been lead to believe that his father was the drummer of a famous band back in the 1970s. His younger sister lives in Porto Seguro, Brasil; he doesn’t deny it and adds with a resentful gaze that they were abandoned by their parents in Pretoria, South Africa, while his father’s band was on tour in that country. James, Carmen and Haché, his younger brother, found themselves alone in a luxury hotel, with their parents missing after a night of heavy drinking and taking drugs. After spending a week living in the hotel, their Aunt took them into her house in Amsterdam where they spent most of their teenage years. That was where James started experimenting and developing his artistic skills, mixing photography and painting from the very beginning. However, a fire that broke out in his Aunt’s flat destroyed most of his initial works. Only a few of them, which he keeps in a safe place, were left. After that incident the three siblings scattered around the world and little is known about their lives until in 2010 I met James at a friend’s restaurant in Ibiza. He was working as a waiter, didn’t look at all like an artist and was very open and outgoing. I liked him from the start. After a night of partying, part of the group of friends who had got together, including myself, went over to his small apartment where I saw some of the works he did now and then. I was most impressed by them as they didn’t resemble anything I had seen until then, with the possible exception of Peter Beard’s works – though without the exoticism of Africa – or perhaps those of Robert Rauschenberg with his typical collages and mixtures of techniques. I proposed to James to leave Ibiza and come over to Barcelona where I would help him to develop all that talent which I could see he possessed but couldn’t exploit for a number of reasons. He arrived in Barcelona shortly after and we got down to work on his first photo session; a whole display of manual processing like I hadn’t seen for quite some time, a camera with film plates, hours spent in the photography lab: "I had forgotten how the liquids smell" – he told me -, artistic papers, paint brushes, water colours, pens, ink… a complex process of work that was totally hand-made. A unique artist in the middle of the digital age; that is what James is. Humberto Vignali Representative and friend

Education:

Life, life, life...

Events:

PRIVATE WORKS: "PORTRAITS"
The process involved, particularly in the case of private works, is very homely and natural. When a client calls for a portrait of himself, James and his team go over to the customer’s house to look for the most appropriate place for the photographic session to take place. While his assistants prepare the set, James, the client and his family share a moment together. In this time, James and the client get to know each other and James can think and decide the best way to make the portrait. In fact, all that is said during this shared moments will be used by James to write notes, make sketches and drawings and he will later on resort to this material when working on the final canvass. After the photo-shooting it is time to develop the film plates, enlarge the photo that has been selected in the lab and, last of all, to paint and write on the photo using water colours, pencils, ink, palette knives, etc, resorting to several techniques. In approximately 2 months the process ends and the customer receives at his home address the finished, framed work, together with a warranty certificate.

Exhibitions:

PRIVATE WORKS: "LIFE ON THE WALL"
In order to do this “visual biography,” James always requests that the candidates should be at least 40 or 50 years old to ensure that they have lived a long life that is full of “substance” and experiences: material so to speak which he will capture and then reflect on a portrait. The process is very similar to the one applied to the portraits we have discussed before but in this case, James spends more time with the client to seek and select the customer’s most appropriate personal photos for the final work. The photos that are chosen for the final collage must be representative of the client’s life and it is he himself (the customer) who has to tell James why such photos are important, what was going on when they were taken, when was that, etc. Once the process of selecting the photos and texts that go with them is over, the photographic session takes place in the client’s house and James then goes to the lab and his studio to work on the layout and design of all the chosen material, sticking and writing by hand the photos and texts on the enlarged photograph of the client. The process takes longer than in the case of the portrait and since the work isn’t final, the clients are given the option of having it finished when they are 80 years old, although that isn’t usual.

James is currently working on Humberto’s "Life on the Wall" and you will soon be seeing some images of it.