Jim Carson was born July 8, 1942 in Little Rock, Arkansas and raised in Memphis, Tennessee. He received a Bachelor of Science from Memphis State University in 1964. In 1970, he earned a Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry and molecular physics from New York University, and subsequently accepted a postdoctoral fellowship to Princeton University to continue research in molecular physics. His doctoral thesis and several other research articles were published in the Journal of Chemical Physics over the next two years. From the fall of 1971 to the spring of 1973 he was on the faculty of Princeton University. During these two years he also commuted to New York every evening to study life drawing, life painting and composition at the Art Students League. He had decided to change his career from science to art, his life long passion