{"id":14420,"date":"2022-10-06T09:03:07","date_gmt":"2022-10-06T16:03:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/paintingperceptions.com\/?p=14420"},"modified":"2022-10-06T09:09:27","modified_gmt":"2022-10-06T16:09:27","slug":"john-bradford-for-the-love-of-paint","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paintingperceptions.com\/john-bradford-for-the-love-of-paint\/","title":{"rendered":"John Bradford: For the Love of Paint"},"content":{"rendered":"

Review by John Goodrich<\/a>, guest contributor<\/h3>\n

Anna Zorina Gallery<\/a><\/h4>\n

until October 15, 2022.<\/p>\n

Certain traits \u2013 a mischievous spirit, a shrewd take on history, a love of the sheer materiality of paint \u2013 will always stand an artist in good stead. John Bradford possesses all of these, plus others that are arguably far more important: he is also a keen colorist, and an eloquent orchestrator of forms \u2013 this eloquence vying, startlingly, with the coarseness of his technique and goofiness of his imagery.<\/p>\n

At a glance, Bradford\u2019s paintings at Anna Zorina confirm an artist full of passionate, if peculiar, purpose. While his images speak of the civilized and traditional \u2013 painters at work, often in nineteenth-century smocks and skirts, grand galleries of paintings, hung salon-style \u2013 all are rendered in slashing, swirling strokes of color that run the gamut from exuberant out-of-the-tube pigments to tawny browns and turgid grays. The scenes are generalized, as is experienced through the lens of a dream, and his figures\u2019 gestures often graceless, at least in any conventional sense; a stretching arm may consist of a single slab of pigment. A certain loopiness presides over the show; before our eyes, the merely picturesque acquires a solemn radiance through the most wayward of means.<\/p>\n

And radiant these paintings are, thanks to Bradford\u2019s luminous color. In real life, light has of course no weight. But the light generated by artists\u2019 colors can lend emphatic pictorial weight to objects. It can impart volume, mass, location\u2014a presence. Coordinated across a canvas\u2019 dimensions, the weightings of forms can build towards a climactic whole. Bradford employs color \u2013 in both local volumes and broader orchestrations \u2013 to lend an offbeat authority to his scenes.<\/p>\n

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JOHN BRADFORD In Praise of Selling Art,<\/em> 2021 acrylic, oil on canvas, 60 x 78 in. Images courtesy of the Anna Zorina Gallery<\/p><\/div>\n

In his \u201cIn Praise of Selling Art\u201d (2021), for instance, a patch of retiring greenish-ochre becomes, palpably, the shadow of a woman standing on the sturdy yellow glow of the floor. Together these colors anchor the rising column of brilliant blue tints and deep, near-black ultramarine \u2013 the lit and shadowed portions of her dress. The quantification of light has begun, and Bradford pursues it through an entire scenario that embraces nine other figures, all in a specific light of a large gallery space. A child in a bright red coat reads theatrically from a sheet of paper, a woman in a gray jacket leans over a table; despite their abbreviated modeling, every gesture rings true. The light shapes the physical spaces, too; at the center, a doorway leads to a more brightly illuminated room beyond, and a distant doorway in this gallery leads to the most vivaciously colored space of all, the outdoors.<\/p>\n

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JOHN BRADFORD Berthe Morisot in Her Studio,<\/em> 2021 acrylic, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in. Images courtesy of the Anna Zorina Gallery<\/p><\/div>\n

In \u201cBerthe Morisot in Her Studio\u201d (2021), the colors of the floor shift improbably from gray-blue to warm pink to green, but somehow capture a perfect impression of sunlight sifting through a window and flowing across the room. A magenta-toned wall behind completes the effect of a bright, contained space, punctuated by the precise notes of painter and model.<\/p>\n

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JOHN BRADFORD The Studio,<\/em> 2022 acrylic, oil on canvas 60 x 78 in. Images courtesy of the Anna Zorina Gallery<\/p><\/div>\n

Countless strokes of color forge a unified impression, once more, in the six-and-a-half-foot-wide painting \u201cThe Studio\u201d (2022). Here, a vast interior space moves though a complex sequence of lit and shadowed zones, while a large artist\u2019s canvas, angling through the depicted space, holds resolutely at the center, its hues balanced point-by-point against the background\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Allusions to the masters abound. In the aforementioned \u201cSelling Art,\u201d a painter eyes us while standing, \u00e0 la Velasquez, next to his huge canvas. \u201dThe Studio\u201d clearly references Courbet\u2019s \u201cAllegory\u201d in its basic composition, while introducing an element borrowed from another Courbet painting: a stream of hounds, frolicking across the studio\u2019s foreground like a piece of knotted fabric. (One of Courbet\u2019s hunting scenes \u2013 with dogs \u2013 has been added helpfully to the back wall.) Several of Bradford\u2019s canvases depict paintings with Renoir-esque nudes, whose forms extend with fleshy vigor across the surface.<\/p>\n

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JOHN BRADFORD A Constable,<\/em> 2021-2022 acrylic, oil on canvas 14 x 18 in Images courtesy of the Anna Zorina Gallery<\/p><\/div>\n

Indeed, suffusing the entire installation is the aura of master-painting \u2013 of an artistic genius\u2019 working process, and the ceremonious displayed of the results. In this sense, Bradford\u2019s paintings are deliberately, conspicuously art about art. But they achieve this in the best possible way, by reasserting the supremacy of light and color. His paintings are not illustrational riffs on cultural icons; the artist imparts to his recycled subjects a new, peculiar gravitas, arrived at through original means, and based in expressions unique to painting. In at least one case, Bradford even exceeds his source material; I found his version of Salisbury Cathedral (dare I say it?) more incandescent and decisive than the Constable paintings that inspired it.<\/p>\n

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JOHN BRADFORD Renoirs in the Studio,<\/em> 2022 acrylic, oil on canvas 36 x 48 in Images courtesy of the Anna Zorina Gallery<\/p><\/div>\n

At times the light\u2019s shaping of spaces takes on a surreal intensity. Somehow, Bradford finesses the telescoping luminosities contained in a painting like his \u201cRenoirs in the Studio,\u201d (2022), in which he captures Renoir\u2019s radiance of modelling within his own radiant depiction of a gallery wall, neither one of them diminishing the other. Qualities of light take on a complex urgency in a painting like \u201cVarnishing Day \u2013 The Red Buoy\u201d (2021), in which the massive girders of an unseen skylight cast shadows across paintings and walls alike. Stranger still are views of galleries in which the shadows appear to be cast by irregular tree canopies or even tiny clouds \u2013 circumstances so unlikely (and so unconducive to normal art-viewing habits) that they test our notions of the credible.<\/p>\n

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JOHN BRADFORD Varnishing Day – The Red Buoy,<\/em> 2021 acrylic, oil on canvas 48 x 60 in images courtesy of the Anna Zorina Gallery<\/p><\/div>\n

But then, it\u2019s the eloquence of an artist\u2019s vision, not the logical reconstruction of the physical world, that makes for meaningful art. On this score Bradford\u2019s paintings reward, in ample, offbeat measure.<\/p>\n

Anna Zorina Gallery<\/a><\/h5>\n
September 6\u2013October 15, 2022<\/h5>\n

532 W 24th St, New York, New York 10011,
\n212.243.2100<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Review by John Goodrich, guest contributor Anna Zorina Gallery until October 15, 2022. Certain traits \u2013 a mischievous spirit, a shrewd take on history, a love of the sheer materiality…<\/p>\n

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