Short Biography

William James Graham Muir (1945- 2025)

Scottish painter and musician studied briefly at Edinburgh School of Art (1966) Jamie is famous for his music.  A percussionist who named, and played on King Crimson’s ‘Lark’s Tongues in aspic’ album (1972-1973) he left the band to become a Buddhist monk and spent the next 7 years as a Buddhist priest in Scotland, Nepal, India and France. Returning to London in the early 80s he started making detailed pencil drawings of figures and landscape and showed this work in Edinburgh, Dumfries, and Cambridge. He moved on to painting large abstract canvases from his garden shed studio in Islington.  Jamie declared, ‘I am a painter now’ and spent 6 months in the USA painting (1988). Eclectically experimenting with many styles and genres, he created huge abstract ‘flow paintings’, and later paintings combine this technique with figures and landscape features. In 1998 he settled in Penzance, Cornwall where smaller paintings often began to feature his satirical ‘cartoon’ figures and were shown at Penzance Arts Club and the Dick the Dog gallery in the early noughties. A keen photographer he completed a FdA in photography in 2010 and started making digital art work. During his lifetime Jamie produced a vast variety of work, much of which has never been publicly seen. Jamie never felt confined to a particular style or genre because what was important to him were ideas. His enduring passion for visual imagery led him to continue to convey those ideas right until the end of his life, where on his hospital bed he could be found drawing.

Although Jamie exhibited in Edinburgh, Dumfries, Cambridge, and Penzance, little was known about his work as a painter and artist.  He did not date his artworks, and many titles are obscure which may have been intentional as Jamie had a playful relationship with language, and where a title is given there are often alternative versions. Fortunately he left clues in his extensive archive of writing, photographs, poems, and ephemera.

He spent over 40 years in London and Penzance making art that was often inspired by improvisational techniques and a vast array of personal and political passions. His creative output is incredibly varied and eclectic, encompassing: figurative pencil drawings, abstract paintings, figurative paintings, paintings and drawings that innovatively combine both abstract and figurative elements, writing, poetry, photography, digital art, ‘cartoon’ drawings and ideas for conceptual art installations