Waterworks Visual Arts Center

Elizabeth Bradford, whose large-scale paintings will be on display in the Stanback Gallery hall, puts it this way:  “As much as I record what is around me, I am also portraying my own spirit in these paintings.    I reinterpret my emotional and spiritual world, inventing colors, and exploding patterns in an attempt to express states of being.”   For Bradford, color is the material expression, caught by the eye, of what the heart feels.  Her notion of pattern is the recognition that there is repetition and continuity.   Few things are isolated occurances, finite and discreet.  Most things in nature have a twin, a fractal, an echo, a shadow, a future manifestation flowing from what they are now.  Pattern speaks to Bradford of timelessness and immortality.

Elizabeth Bradford is descended from generations of North Carolina farmers and she reflects those strong southern roots in her work.   Her father and grandfather rode a tractor over her acres, and in her own way, she continues that tradition as a contemporary painter—working that same land with her eyes and her brush. Bradford says, “During most of my adult life I have watched the loss of open spaces, the harvesting of old growth forests, and the construction of thousands of new houses—the ‘final harvest’.  Raised a naturalist I couldn’t escape painting an elegy for the land as I remember it and as it can still be found—in hidden pockets of the forests.   My life falls on the cusp of change; born into the post war rural south, I now live and work in the urban, technological south.   My work attempts to seize the look and feel of this place before it is forever changed, and to perhaps cause the viewer to weigh the value of those changes.”  

Bradford’s process has evolved from several long explorations of various media.  She currently works in both acrylic and oil on canvas or board, in every possible scale from intimate to large and inescapable.  The work is informed by the needlework traditions of southern women since North Carolina was settled, and the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 70’s.  Emotionally, the work is connected to Earth Art.  It bows to the traditions of abstraction, while also striving to clearly represent the depth of my experience of nature.  Most of all, Bradford hopes that the artwork “communicates both a meditation and a prayer for this time in this lovely place on earth.”

Elizabeth Bradford has exhibited work professionally for over three decades.  She received her bachelor’s degree and did post-graduate work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Her paintings are included in many important collections internationally, including those of the Mint Museum and Bank of America.  She is represented by Christa Faut Gallery in Cornelius, NC.