As a favored “in-crowd” pop artist living in LA in the early 60’s, James Gill would hit the town with celebs like Tony Curtis, or perhaps have breakfast (and bourbon) with icon John Wayne.

But 10 years in the fast lane was enough.

Gill slowly realized that money and fame wasn’t all it took to make people happy. By the end of the 1960s he had left Hollywood for “the middle of nowhere” on the California/Oregon border. He grew his hair and beard long, bulldozed a driveway for himself, and built a house. Along the way, and to the surprise of many folks in the art community, he simply dropped out of the American pop art scene and consequently lost track of a lucrative career.

“I thought I could take my reputation with me and keep selling paintings, but it didn’t happen,” Gill says in “James Gill: Full Circle,” Jeffrey M. Long’s film currently airing on The Documentary Channel.

Today, after 30 some-odd years away from the art scene, Gill, whose paintings (along with those of Andy Warhol) helped make Marilyn Monroe an American icon, is back. And he’s added computer skills to his painter’s palette, which he learned during years of architecture work as a fall-back career of sorts.   Today technology allows him to sometimes finish one of his complex collage-paintings in a single day.

"There are no rules to what's on the canvas," Gill says, “now I'm trying to blow my mind and anyone else who wants to look at it."

He does a lot of his mind blowing with solid bright colors.  Red. Blue. Yellow. Green. Mixing mediums and being smart enough to understand his subject are among his skills. It seems his work is still filled with beautiful female pop icons like Elizabeth Taylor.“A beautiful woman ... there's just nothing like it," Gill says, noting that he has a particular love for their lips.

This time around his studio isn’t in Los Angeles, but his childhood town of San Angelo, Texas, where he recently returned to live with his sixth wife. Gill is even back to his old clothes: blue jeans, a bright blue Western shirt and a bone-colored cowboy hat. He’s taken up residence at the Cactus Hotel in downtown San Angelo where wealthy ranchers lived when he was a kid.

“Full Circle” the documentary doesn’t explore how or why this artist has had six wives. Instead it focuses on his art, and rightly so. At just 33 years old, he was commissioned to paint the cover of Time Magazine. It was a picture of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a political prisoner and Russian novelist. Few artists have had such an honor, and at that young of an age.

The same year, 1968, Gill was chosen, along with Warhol and Jasper Johns, as one of 20 painters in America to have his work exhibited at an important art festival in Brazil. His work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

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Greg Crofton