He calls his current work “phony”. “I’ve got the skill down pat, now”, he says, "and I can use it like a juggler. But it’s not a part of me anymore; I don’t have any emotional investment in it.”
Leonard Leone says that if a second flood should come and he should get to play a modern Noah and preserve one example of everything of importance from destruction, he would pick James Avati, who he calls “an artist’s artist”, to represent cover art.
About Avati’s technique he says: “He knows you can make a picture extremely realistic if you paint it five feet tall- then, when you reduce it, everything becomes much sharper. He always brought in these enormous paintings. He also knows that when you look at someone, you always focus on one particular part of them, usually their eyes. That meansthat the eyes or the head have to be drawn very sharply. That’s where the suggestion of clarity is, the rest of the figure doesn’t need to be clear at all.”
But Avati himself says he has neverthought about things like that. To him, the atmosfphere and the relationship between the people in the image have always been the most important considerations.
In the early ‘50s, Avati divorced Jane Hamill and remarried. He now lives separated from his second wife, Linda. Leigh, the woman he calls “my greatest love”,died in 1978 aged 24.
In 1981, four of Avati’s original paintings were displayed in the exhibition “Paperbacks U.S.A.” in the Hague, Holland.
Cover artist Stanley Meltzoff sums up James Avati in this way: “Avati stands alone, not only as the great pioneer, but also as the best of us all, right up to today. He is the only one who counts- everyone else just passed through.”
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(from The Book of Paperbacks by Piet Schreuders, Virgin Books,1981)