John Bradford “Land and By Sea”

Anna Zorina

[Image: John Bradford "Mayflower November 11 1620" (2019) acrylic, oil on canvas , 48 x 60 in.]

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Anna Zorina Gallery presents By Land and By Sea, John Bradford’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The show features the artist’s latest paintings that offer his contemporary take on historical subjects.

The show’s title takes Longfellow’s famous poem about warning signals of an impending British invasion and twists it into an ironic commentary on the historical narrative of America. Using a wide range of formal techniques, perfected over an active painting life of over 50 years, the artist employs both graphic tonalities and intense chromatic colors, palette knife scrapes and hits, bangs and touches of his brush and fingers, but, above all, with his piles and piles of paint. Bradford uses these oft-told stories to create his own brand of personal American chronicles that glorify the ephemeral nuances of air, light and space.

A work of modern art is always about something else: a sentiment, the complex synaptic bundling of memories, associations, emotions and cross-references, dreamt and real, that are triggered by some random event sensorially experienced; a face, pose, movie sequence, one color against another, a great painting or a very bad one or hearing a name you have known your entire life like Lincoln, Mayflower or Mount Vernon.

Mr. Bradford’s reductive vocabulary invites a radical degree of participation by the viewer in completing the creative process. The goal is not to interpret, instruct or propagandize but to create a painterly space, an open field on which a game can unfold with the subject matter as both boundary line and umpire. As the artist has already left the field, the game is really played wholly within the viewer’s responses, not with the artist who has no skin left in the game. The viewer always wins.

JOHN BRADFORD (b. 1949, Wilmington, Delaware) received his BFA from Cooper Union in 1971 and MFA from Yale University School of Art in 1979. He is the 2011 recipient of prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Painting. John Bradford’s work has been reviewed in the New York Times, ArtNews, Village Voice, the Jewish Press and Hudson Review.