English
b. 1937, Bloxwich, United Kingdom — d. 2010, Catalonia, Spain

Jim Bird received his artistic education at the Walsall School of Art and at the Wolverhampton College of Art where he studied graphic design.

In 1968, Bird left a successful design studio in England to live as an artist in Spain. He soon joined the Galeria Joan Prats in Barcelona, ​​one of the most prestigious galleries in Spain. In 1980, he and his wife moved to New York, where he became acquainted with several key names in abstract art, such as Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, Christo, and the British sculptor Sir Anthony Caro. Motherwell in particular became important to Bird, and the two held several exhibitions together both in Spain and in the United States. After Motherwell's death, Bird was the only artist on the board of the Daedalus Foundation, created by Motherwell to distribute his art to public institutions in the United States.

Critic Nissa Torrents characterized Birds' work as follows: Jim Bird is a gentle giant in search of the fleeting. His impatience has a center, a strong longing for essences: for light, water, air and earth, basic landscape components that he transforms into his abstract color fields, as he explores the possibilities of the picturesque. Bird's work is constantly changing. For him, the outside world is a source of visual impulses, in constant renewal, which he transforms into imagery, he never lets the impression stiffen [...]

Bird's work often depicted what he called the landscape of the mind, which was about the space the human soul creates to explore its freedom. Often this was related to his memories and feelings about Spain.

Jim Bird has exhibited in galleries and museums in Spain, England, Germany and the United States. His work has also been exhibited at the Basel Art Fair, The International Navy Pier Exposition in Chicago and The International Print Biennale in England.In 1962, Jim Bird left a successful design studio in England to live as an artist in Spain. He soon became affiliated with Galeria Joan Prats in Madrid, one of the most prestigious galleries in Spain and beyond. Sustaining a tradition of gestural field abstraction, he described his work as a direct drive approach to painting. 

His sensuous surfaces fix a nuanced ground of texture juxtaposed by deliberate but passionate inscriptions of looping trails of paint across light and dark regions alike. In a 1990 interview Bird poetically stated, It is obvious that great art has its source at some point beyond conscious striving, and if this fount is to become accessible it requires an act of faith on the part of the artist to do “nothing” and to allow the dreaming and fantasizing, that least understood part of the creative endeavor, to take place.

Jim Bird's work has been shown in galleries and collected by museums in Spain, England, Germany, the United States and worldwide. His art has also been exhibited at the Basel Art Fair, the International Navy Pier Exposition in Chicago, and the International Print Biennale (England).

In 1997, Bird moved back to Spain, where he lived and worked until his death in 2010.