James Neil HOLLINGSWORTH
1954, USA

About James Neil Hollingsworth

I enlisted in the Air Force right out of high school at eighteen. It was 1972, I had no interest in going to college, my draft number was 9, and I was most likely headed to Vietnam. I had loved air planes since childhood, so joining the Air Force seemed a logical next move. I spent most of my service in California, and after my discharge returned to Atlanta where I worked a variety of day jobs while attending college at night.

It was during this time that I discovered Soaring. One introductory flight and I was hooked. For the better part of the following year I spent nearly all of my weekends, weather permitting, flying sailplanes. Over time the lure of aviation became so strong that I decided to put the academic world on hold, and entered technical school. In two years I was a licensed aircraft mechanic working at a local airport.

Aviation, at this time, was an all consuming passion for me, yet between working on aircraft, flying and a short lived affair with skydiving, I still found time to paint the occasional watercolor, or illuminate a letter to a friend.

At the end of a particularly cold winter spent working in an unheated hangar, I found myself tempted to change careers when the father of a friend, who owned a graphic design business, offered me a job as a paste up artist. The idea of working in any sort of art related business was impossible to resist, so I made the decision to mothball my tools and accept his offer. Two weeks later I was sitting at a drafting table working as an “artist”.

A chance reunion a couple of years later with my high school friend Michel Valin led to a partnership in his typesetting/graphic design company. It was a great job but sadly, towards the end of our sixth year of operation, the growing popularity of desktop publishing had taken such a heavy toll on our business that we reluctantly agreed to close our shop. In the months that followed I worked for a number of design firms on a salaried, and freelance basis.

Ready to give up the freelance life for a “stable” job with a regular paycheck I decided to follow in the footsteps of my wife Karen, who at the time was working as a registered nurse. Two, very tough, years of nursing school later, I was an RN.

My nursing career began in the ER, but I eventually moved to the operating room. I had worked there nearly ten years when our friends Jeff and Leslie Cohen told Karen and I how they had begun to sell their artwork over the internet. Excited by the prospect we decided to give it a try ourselves and quickly discovered it was possible. I spent the following year working days in the OR, and painting nights and weekends. At the close of that year, income from my art had reached a point that I felt confident to take the leap, leave nursing, and begin to paint full-time.

I am now I’m represented in two fine art galleries, and have my paintings in private, and corporate collections throughout the United States, and around the world.

Source: http://web.mac.com/hollingsworthjames/neilart/Index.html http://www.neilhollingsworth.com/bio.html