mrJames is an artist and storyteller whose work draws from the questions that lingered after childhood—and the joy of following them into new forms.
Through painting, video, and collage, he creates bold, color-saturated works that merge pop culture, folk art, and personal myth into something distinctly his own. At the heart of his practice are the Billies: beings who explore life’s big, recurring questions with a kind of innocent wisdom.
Each piece invites the viewer into a world that feels both familiar and quietly cosmic—where queerness isn’t a subject but a way of seeing, and where simple symbols hold deep emotional and philosophical weight. Drawing from his time in fashion, his love of storytelling, and a deep reverence for transformation, mrJames builds not just images but joyful cosmologies—spaces for reflection, wonder, and the magic of becoming.
His work is a tenderly human response to the strangeness of being alive.
mrJames approaches painting as a way of testing meaning rather than illustrating it. His work centers on a set of recurring archetypes, each tuned to a distinct emotional state. These figures are not narrative devices but structural ones, returning across paintings as he refines whether they can hold feeling without collapsing into explanation. Building inward and letting it take the shape of culture, the work forms a personal cosmology that shifts, repeats, and holds.
In addition to his fine art practice, MrJames works as a graphic designer under the name DaltonMade
Clients have included:
BANANA REPUBLIC • TIMBERLAND • MARMOT • THE BLACK DOG TAVERN COMPANY • DKNY • MERRELL • G.H.BASS & CO. • IZOD