Fred Jamar, born 1940, has led a life as varied and adventurous as his paintings.
Born in the village of Stembert in southern Belgium, near the site of the Battle of the Bulge, he grew up with an early fascination for drawing and painting, creating images on whatever materials he could find—bedsheets, cardboard, even salvaged tarps when he later served at sea. After graduating valedictorian from the Belgian Maritime College, Jamar spent three years as a merchant marine officer before turning to finance, earning a master’s-equivalent degree and beginning a distinguished career with J.P. Morgan & Co. His work took him across the globe—Brussels, Paris, London, Frankfurt, New York—and he became a founding figure in the Eurobonds clearing house in 1967 before later focusing on international credit risk. Yet despite this success, painting remained his truest passion. Jamar has often said that if given the chance to live his life over again, he would dedicate all his energy to art.
In 1997, he retired early and settled permanently in Charleston, South Carolina, a city he calls “the most European of American cities.” There, he immersed himself fully in painting, bringing a new infusion of intellect and energy to the local art scene. Working primarily in oils, Jamar often paints directly on canvas with little preliminary sketching, using palette knives, trowels, and heavy texture to capture his vision. His most recognizable works are Charleston cityscapes, though not rendered in the traditional way. Under his brush, skies turn into deep, inky Prussian blue voids, trees swell into balloon-like “bubble” forms of color, and houses and landmarks glow in vivid hues against the darkness. The result is both luminous and haunting—streets and buildings appear at once lively in color and eerily still in atmosphere, often devoid of human or animal presence. His work has been described as if Edward Hopper painted an abandoned carnival at 3 a.m.—bright, brilliant, yet steeped in solitude.
Jamar’s paintings have won him widespread recognition in Charleston and beyond. He was the winner of the 2002 Cooper River Bridge Run Design Competition, has been a juried exhibitor in Piccolo Spoleto, and has had numerous solo exhibitions. His work has been featured in regional art festivals and competitions, and he has produced an impressive body of work, sometimes completing more than ninety paintings in a year. In Charleston, he is represented by Robert Lange Studios on Queen Street and has long been associated with The Vendue, the city’s art hotel, which originally welcomed him as a short-term studio artist but continues to celebrate his presence years later.
Deeply inspired by artists such as Van Gogh, Modigliani, Utrillo, Bernard Buffet, and Suzanne Valadon, Jamar remains largely self-taught, guided by instinct, experimentation, and an abiding love of process. For him, the physical act of painting—the smell of turpentine, the feel of oil pigment, the rhythm of creating—is as essential as the finished work itself. Now in Charleston, surrounded by the architecture, trees, and skies that have become his muse, Fred Jamar continues to transform the city into images that are uniquely his own: brilliant, moody, and timeless.
