AT 76, JIM FULLER PAINTS LIKE A MAN MAKING UP FOR lost time. After decades spent building a successful real estate business with his wife, Elaine, he’s finally circled back to his first love: painting.
It’s a familiar story, really. As a child, Fuller showed enough talent that his parents sent him to private lessons at the age of 12. The Atlanta-based art teacher helped him harness his skills, teaching him techniques that gave him a solid foundation in painting still lifes. By high school, however, all thoughts of launching himself into an art career had been superseded by something much more practical, and Fuller started college with his eye cast on a science-based degree. “I still remember sitting down with my father and telling him that I didn’t think it was going to work out,” Fuller says with a laugh. “I told him I wanted to change my major to art, and he just said, ‘You probably should have done that in the first place.’”
Finally focused on a path that would truly fulfill him, Fuller went on to graduate from Georgia State University with a Bachelor of Visual Arts in painting, with a heavy concentration on art history. He put his skills to work as a freelance artist for various companies in Atlanta, where he met his future wife, Elaine, a successful interior designer and real estate investor. They later married and joined forces, deciding that a focus on real estate was a more prudent path. Over the next three decades, Fuller’s full focus was spent on real estate investments—an attainable means of wealth that made the ideals of an artist seemingly pale in comparison.
Fuller’s time to shine has finally come, and the passion that has been bottled for more than 30 years has found its outlet. A man who loves color, design and the effects of texture, he works in a style that is rooted in classical tradition yet tinged with a modern edge—or, as he calls it, “slightly modern realism.”
Still lifes and landscapes fascinate him; the play of light, the quiet elegance of curves and lines, the range of colors found in nature—these are Fuller’s sources of inspiration as he picks up his brush and puts pigment to canvas. “I just like creating something that wasn’t there a few days before,” he says. Simple words, maybe. But for Fuller, they carry the weight of a lifetime.
As he builds his portfolio, Fuller’s work shows a heavy focus on botanicals. “My wife loves flowers, so I tend to paint them for her,” he says. “I also find them to be one of the most interesting things you can paint. Flowers and plants allow you an incredible amount of creative freedom—the colors, the textures, they’re infinitely interesting and unique. You can get any kind of color you want, you can arrange it anyway you want it, and you’re not restricted by having to have it just so. Sometimes I paint in the colors that are there, sometimes I change them—but I tend to keep everything in the same values so nothing really stands out from the rest or seems too shocking.”
Fuller’s growing body of work also includes what he calls “rurals”—pieces that feature pastoral scenes, from barns and mountains to landscapes with livestock. “I have a piece that is just this big steer standing on a hill,” he says. “You see the hill first, and then you notice there’s a steer standing there. It’s kind of subtle, and I like that. I like that it’s not one particular thing—it’s a combination, done in an almost abstract way. The focus isn’t really the steer or the landscape—it’s whatever you as a viewer want to focus on.”
What Fuller himself focuses on when it comes to his subject matter comes down to the same thing as real estate: location. A part-time resident of Florida with an additional home in Atlanta, the North Carolina-based artist draws heavily on the contrast of his surroundings. “Each place results in a different look and feel to my paintings,” says Fuller, whose three working studios greatly factor into what he paints at any given time. “I’m inspired when we’re down in Florida to do more tropical paintings—pieces where the subjects are based on some kind of warm-weather subjects, whether it’s an orchid or a beach or a heron in front of a beach. Just anything that has that more coastal, beachy feel to it. When we’re in North Carolina, we’re in the mountains, which really gives me a lot of the more rural scenery to influence my work. Flowers, of course, can be anywhere.”
Regardless of what he’s painting or where he’s painting at any given moment, it is the color and textures of Fuller’s work that are most striking—even when his hues are muted. The tone of his pieces, static though the scenes may be, gives them a whimsical quality that lies in direct contrast with the precision of his brushstrokes, and his textural application makes it seem as though you can reach out to feel the soft waxiness of the flower petals in his florals, the puff of a cloud above a rural landscape, the bumps and rough ridges of a seashell.
For Fuller, returning to painting isn’t about chasing fame or success—it’s about honoring the quiet joy he finds in creation. Each canvas reflects not only the landscapes and objects around
him but also the years of patience and discipline that delayed, but never diminished, his artistic talent. After a lifetime of detours, Fuller paints with the earnestness of someone who knows the value of time and the beauty of finally coming home to what he was always meant to do. *
Liesel Schmidt lives in Navarre, Florida, and works as a freelance writer for local and regional magazines. She is also a web content writer and book editor. Follow her on X at @laswrites or download her novels, Coming Home to You, The Secret of Us and Life Without You, at amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.
