Katherine Bradford is an American contemporary artist. The subjects typical for her figurative and abstract colorful paintings include the objects associated with fire, air, and water, like ocean liners and swimmers. Straightforward in appearance, all of them stand for such human feelings like fear, wonder, vulnerability, hubris, and joy.
Background
Ethnicity:
Katherine Bradford’s grandparents immigrated to the United States from Europe in the 1930s. Her grandfather came from France.
Katherine Bradford was born in 1942 in New York City, New York, United States. Bradford’s mother was the daughter of an architect.
Education
Although Bradford was raised in a city of New Canaan, Connecticut where Philip Johnson, the notable American architect worked, she was not fascinated by art from her early years. An active child and teenager who loved to be in a company, she played tennis and was in a swim team.
Katherine Bradford received her general education at a boarding school for girls. While there, she edited the school’s newspaper and produced cartoons about the traditions of the institution.
Then, Bradford received a Bachelor of Arts from Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania. It was followed by a Master of Fine Arts degree from State University of New York at Purchase.
Since the beginning of her career, Katherine Bradford has extensively exhibited throughout the United States and has taken part in many solo and group shows in Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Greece, Ireland, and elsewhere.
The artist has also tried herself in academics. In 1995, Bradford joined the professor’s staff of the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. In a couple of years, she also became an educator at the MFA Faculty of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She left the Institute in 2011 and the Academy a year after. From 2016 to 2017, Bradford worked as a senior critic at the Yale School of Art in New Haven. She also was an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine.
Nowadays, Katherine Bradford shares her time between Brunswick, Maine and New York City where she works in the Williamsburg studio in Brooklyn. The representative of her art is CANADA in New York City, Campoli Presti Gallery in London and Paris, and Philip Haverkampf in Berlin.
The most recent solo show of the artist is the 2019 exhibition held at Campoli Presti Gallery.
Katherine Bradford’s figurative artworks are often inspired either in content or color palette by the art of Marsden Hartley, Milton Avery, Alex Katz, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Mark Rothko.
Quotations:
"What interests me the most is the language of painting – how people are able to say things using paint."
"I always associate painting with poetry. It was a comment, an eloquent comment on life. I never saw it as some kind of protest. I saw painting as a celebration. I don’t make paintings out of rage. I haven’t found enough rage in me to do that. It’s important to me to make upbeat paintings. If anything, I’m making paintings about enchantment."
"I’m interested in making paintings that are about something bigger than everyday life – something very universal."
Interests
Artists
Marsden Hartley, Milton Avery, Alex Katz, Fairfield Porter
Connections
Katherine Bradford’s son Arthur is a writer and moviemaker. The artist’s daughter, Laura, works as Cambridge University professor of law.
Son:
Arthur Bradford
Daughter:
Laura Bradford
References
Katherine Bradford: Paintings
The first monograph of Katherine Bradford collects her best paintings from 2015 to the present, alongside essays by Karen Wilkin, who explores Bradford's relationship to the history of American painting, and a memoir from Arthur Bradford, the artist's son.