Son of art critic
Sandra McGrath and banker Michael Anthony (Tony) McGrath, after graduating high school, James travelled to Paris to study the techniques and principles of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century masters under the guidance of artist
Patrick Betaudier. Upon returning to
Australia, McGrath began work as a studio assistant to
Arthur Boyd. He went on to earn a
Bachelor of Architecture from the
University of New South Wales. During this period as an architect, McGrath discovered that Baroque techniques enabled him to connect architecture and art by filling the void space within the CAD (
Computer-Aided Design) modelling with narrative. "It occurred to me too, that while you’re on a computer, you are looking through the same perspective window into a 3-D world that Renaissance perspective artists tried to do." In 2010, he was granted special access to the Strahov Baroque Monastic Library in
Prague. Set within this notable historic building, the monastery's libraries hold over 125,000 volumes of philosophical and theological texts which McGrath used as inspiration for his body of work
Ex Libris. He was quoted in an article by The
Australian Financial Review that his twin daughters motivated him to create the work; "I realised my children were not going to have a library like mine, so I painted them one." == Awards & Media ==