Artist James Welling was born in Hartford, CT in 1951. James Welling grew up in nearby Simsbury, and as a teenager he frequently visited museums and galleries in New York. From 1969 to 1971 Welling attended Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he studied drawing with Gandy Bodie. In the fall of 1970 he began a series of gray monochrome paintings, as well as a group of outdoor site-specific sculptures. At this time he also made his first black and white photographs - night exposures of Pittsburgh.