James Mueller
Absolutely. Improbably. Unconventional.
An Artist Who Lived the Stories He Wanted to Tell. James Mueller's life has been almost as unconventional as his art.
Raised in New Hope, Pennsylvania – one of America's famous art colonies – James grew up in an environment where imagination was encouraged and few ideas seemed off limits. He eventually became the artist and writer he had imagined himself becoming, despite being told by a vocational counselor that his strongest aptitude was mathematics and that he shouldn't pursue art.
He ignored the advice.
In 1976, only a few years after beginning his career, Mueller's paintings caught the attention of a prominent businessman and collector who purchased his entire collection. That discovery led to exhibitions around the country and internationally, including a solo exhibition in Paris. His career would take him from painting Native American subjects and American landscapes to portraits of figures including President Nixon and actor Will Sampson.
But James's life has never been confined to the art world. He has hitchhiked across the country, lived in a teepee, worked a variety of jobs, served as an Army entertainer near the Korean DMZ, worked in military intelligence, and once guarded more than a million dollars' worth of Peruvian gold. He has spent more than two decades working and living with individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities and has lived and worked within the Apache community.
Those experiences became part of the raw material for his writing. James is the author of Confessions of St. Augustine, a literary memoir combining his prose with his original artwork. The book explores faith, solitude, rebellion, and the search for creative truth. His later work includes The Donnie Diaries, a multi-book series combining satire, cultural criticism, spirituality, and dark humor.
There is an unexpected thread running through all of it: James has never been particularly interested in living the conventional life.
Even after achieving success as an artist, he eventually chose a deliberately simple, almost monastic existence. As he explains, he wanted to live the kind of life he had once imagined writing about. And perhaps that is the best way to understand James Mueller.
He doesn't simply write stories. He's spent his life collecting them.