James C. Nagle didn't intend to become an artist, but his path turned him toward combining his pleasures and abilities, and he added the determination that it takes to strike out along a path that most people would call very different.

While working at a metals foundry in the mid-1960s in Pennsylvania, he was assigned to a team working on monumental public art bronzes, particularly focal point fountains for parks. It still brings a smile of pride when he tells people his first projects weighed in at 35 tons. Those projects still stand on their commissioned bases as part of the daily lives of the residents and business people of Philadelphia.

The question then became, what can one man alone produce, and he became a hobbyist sculptor, apprenticing himself to himself for several years, selling paintings primarily at festivals, getting a feel for his audience. He was certainly encouraged by the public and by his wife, who had some art training in college. But as with many artists, the practice of art was more appropriate to his way of doing things than art school would have been.

Recognizing the allure the American West had for him, he first vacationed to Arizona and then moved his family nearly across the country to be part of it.

His first paintings made emblems of his boyhood fascination with Indians. His success there came from his keen eye for detail. Always an observer, he thought much about the women in his family, particularly his wife and daughter. Even in these earlier years, Nagle won prizes in competitions and notice from bank collections in Arizona, where many pieces were purchased for the permanent collections. A great corporate idea to support the artists of the state!

While Nagle's experimentation with mediums continues, he seems for the moment to have drifted from the safe harbors of representational art and into the more abstract art forms, particularly with his sculpture. There he is free to use the puns of language to reinforce and highlight his intentions in his original and fresh abstract imagery. In these abstract forms he seems to work with weight and absence of weight, with the contrast of two mediums, or with two highly divergent forms.

As he matures as an artist, his perspective grows as do his concerns. He will be coming up to another change, it's a natural thing, and as he plugs into contemporary life, he is often finding voice for a slightly satiric nature -- one that doesn't always swallow the current culture whole. Many of his patrons and appreciators join him in that.

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