James Mazzotta was raised in South Jersey by the shore soaking in all the sights and crazy people that inhabited the place by the boardwalk in the 1960s and 1970s. This experience provided him with a colorful backdrop in which he grew up while attending a Catholic School where he was ferociously patronized by ominous nuns. The carnival sounds, atmosphere, colors and smells, delivered Mazzotta lots of raw creative material to work with as a young artist. The artist made landfall at another beach in South West Florida shaded with beautiful palms. While working as a political illustrator, cartoonist and photo editor, and artist in the newspaper business, his award-winning work appeared in US News, the New York Times, London Times and many other national publications. Today Mazzotta and Kathleen, his artist wife, operate and own their island art gallery just a short distance from the Gulf of Mexico. The couple often collaborates on art projects.
In the early 1980s, Mazzotta broke a new ground in screen printed images with his highly detailed, vibrant, airbrushed art. The artist joined his humorous and realistic takes on the lifestyle at the beach with the lyrics of Buffet Jimmy. The result was stunning illustrated stories of escaping to relaxed ports of call. Mazzotta’s visual narrations portray imaginative destinations to slipshod locales inhabited a lone schooners plying turquoise waters or by humorous characters. The original, unmistakable tradition and look of the artist’s storytelling style continues today as can be seen in his most recent works.
