JAMES WOODSON(b. 1941, Waco, Texas) is an American painter whose work engages the landscape as a site of perception, memory, and temporal depth. Educated at Texas Christian University (BFA, 1965) and the University of Texas at Austin (MFA, 1967), Woodson has been a central figure in the Texas art scene for decades, both as an artist and as an educator.

Woodson’s paintings are rooted in the high desert regions of Texas and New Mexico, particularly the area around Abiquiú, where he has spent significant time since the late 1980s. These landscapes are not depicted descriptively, but reimagined through vivid color, abstraction, and layered spatial structures that evoke geological time and quiet transformation. Architecture, terrain, and atmosphere merge into fields of shifting perception, where form appears to emerge, dissolve, and reconfigure.

From 1974 to 2013, Woodson taught at Texas Christian University’s School of Art, where he influenced generations of artists through his emphasis on technical rigor, independent vision, and sustained attention to place. In 2013, he was named Texas State Visual Artist (2D) by the Texas Commission on the Arts. Now retired from teaching, Woodson continues to paint full-time, guided by an enduring engagement with the land and the slow unfolding of time within it.