Alabama University of Alabama Huntsville Atlanta School of Art University of Alabama Living and working in Alabama, Jim Felder focuses on creating landscapes with oil paints and watercolors. His family moved to Alabama in the mid-fifties when Jim’s father went to work for Dr. Von Braun and America’s moon mission. But a future in engineering was not for Jim; Jim’s youth was most often spent in the woods or fields where they lived, “...ringed by mountains beneath a jeweled night sky that slipped away from us long ago in the blinding lights of our growth. It was here that I first learned to engage nature as it actually is, not as we are expected to see it.” In adulthood his family and he enjoyed five years in Giles County, Tennessee, where its fields, streams and hollows remain an inspiration for his work. Jim spent nearly his entire career as an illustrator, artist, and graphic designer. Through those decades he pursued watercolor as an expressive medium. It was not until he survived serious cancer just after his retirement in 2019 that he took up oil painting. Now, I cherish waking each day to improve, to learn, to immerse in the language of landscapes expressed through oil painting. In recent years my work has taken on an intent that it did not previously possess: The preservation in images of the remnants of an outdoors I knew as a child and have enjoyed through the many years since. What I once pursued for its simple beauty has become my desire for its immortality