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James Harden DeWitt died November 19, under the care of hospice at his home in Point Richmond, CA. He was 92-years-old.
Jim was born in Oakland, CA in 1930. At age 7, he drew pictures of sailboats while watching his father build a 19-foot sloop in the family’s backyard. Then at age 19, he purchased materials and built his own small boat, an El Toro (#216), and began racing it on Lake Merritt in Oakland, CA.
This launched Jim’s remarkable and highly unique career. He became internationally known both as a fine artist who specialized in action-packed, spirited and accurate portraiture of racing yachts, and also as one of the most successful yacht racers from the San Francisco Bay.
School was difficult for Jim as he was dyslexic at a time when nobody understood what that meant. Teachers told him he was lazy or stupid. Fortunately he took an art class in high school and did well. His mother was thrilled and got him into art school. This, he said, “saved his life”.
After high school, Jim trained for six years as an artist, first attending Oakland’s California College of Arts and Crafts, and then Los Angeles Art Center in Pasadena, one of the premier art colleges in the United States.
To save money while going to art school in LA, Jim started making dinghy racing sails for himself. This led to his own sail loft when he returned with his young family to the Bay Area in about 1960. DeWitt Sails operated for many years in a quonset hut on MacDonald and San Pablo Avenue in Richmond.
The business was moved to Brickyard Cove in Point Richmond into a brand new building that housed both the sail loft and his art studio in 1980. A few years later, Jim sold his loft to Sobstad Sails so that he could focus on his art career. Sobstad sold the loft to Quantum. It still operates out of the same building today. – Read on
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