David Bradford: Recent Work
Yet again, I feel tremendous gratitude for my gallery job. Every few weeks, I get to contemplate the work of a fellow gallery member, to honor their work and archive the show online. With David Bradford’s most recent show, there is just so much to love. His work is painterly, inventive, and poignant. They represent nature while existing as their own experiences. Bradford states, “I take what I need from nature, and no more than that. What I need is a motif that serves as a springboard for my imagination, with a structure that I can improvise around.” Engaging in a brief email exchange about his work, he shared that none of the paintings were plein air or fully observational. He does draw on site, but then he brings them to the studio to construct his paintings through improvisation. This process allows him to “arrive at a painting’s reality through abstraction.”
This process allows Bradford to get at the essences of his motifs in his own way. He paint being on a hot beach: the saturation of color, the blurring of pasty white skin into the background sand, the repetition of blue-and-white-striped beach objects, and that figure in front–cloaked in a hat and long sleeve jacket, facing in whatever direction they can in order to endure the oppressive beach sun.
David Bradford, Pink Shirt, oil on canvas, 18x27 inches, 2021
Alternatively, the beach scene, itself, becomes a master class in mark making and invention with color, as he constructs a sky that captures the double edged sword of a day at the beach: a blue, sunny sky, with intimations of the turbulence of wind and heat–modulations of unedited marks of blues that span the spectrum, from orange to purple. The beach itself is equally as exciting, complementing the purples and blues with patches of yellows and oranges, with occasional hits of green and red from the figures stretched out in various poses.
David Bradford, Beach, oil on canvas 12x21 inches, 2021
In Sailboat, a collection of colorful figures and objects fill an otherwise bright white boat on another sunny day. A peachy white, wave-like cloud slopes downward and coordinates with the orange and white ascending line on the bottom of the picture plane, both leading the eye to focus on the sail. There is a monumentality to this piece: the immense sail, emblematic of coastal summer imagery, with its rich red rectangular band and modulating orange shadow on an otherwise brilliant white triangular plane, stands as the guardian for their summertime adventure out in the ocean. However cliche this sort of imagery tends to be, Bradford avoids this entirely by cropping the boat and focusing on the graphic division of the picture plane–a Hiroshige-meets-Vuillard compositional structure.
David Bradford, Sailboat, oil on canvas, 18x20 inches, 2025
Across this show, Bradford investigates compressed space and frontality, constructing pictures that have a deep space with colorful shapes that push to the front of the picture plane. In Still Life, Garlic Scapes, the space is further compressed by flattening the table top to meet with the plane of the back brick wall. There is an axis through the center of the piece, slightly eschew from vertical, where objects march us towards, in alternating dialectical harmony. Here, a brilliantly saturated orange, with an intersecting deep green garlic scape marks the true center of the plane. The wispy scapes then lead us up and out, to marvel at the light hitting the brick on the back wall. In the bottom right corner, the arc of the back of a Windsor chair echoes the lazy bends of the long scapes in the top half of the plane.
David Bradford, Still Life, Garlic Scapes, oil on canvas, 23x14 inches, 2024
To reiterate the Dufy quote that Bradford included in the press release for this show, “Painting means creating an image which is not the image of the appearance of things, but which has the power of their reality.” Whether this be a reminder or a mantra for us all to live by, David Bradford has achieved this in every piece in this beautiful show.
David Bradford: Recent Paintings opens on December 30, 2025 and closes on January 24, 2026, with an opening reception on Thursday, January 8, from 5-8pm.
-eileen mooney.
