Katherine Bradford: Deep image painting
Katherine Bradford, Water Lady, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 80 x 68 inches
Contributed by Jason Andrew
The art of Katherine Bradford, on view at Canada through October 21, is deep image painting. Her often heroic imagery and surrealist leaps echo a floating world, one that narratively exists between the real and the dream. Each work has a self-conscious spiritualist language that represents a developing poetic stance – a story that starts, but never finishes its tale.
Take the painting Water Lady, a monolithic central figure with a glowing red rectangle on the chest, kneels in a pool of water. In a cross-body reach, the figure collects water as it pours from a bottle suspended in mid-air. It’s a dreamlike picture in which identity is represented not just by the faceless pink painted human form, but also by the collective symbolic setting. What’s most arresting about this picture, aside from the odd outstretched arms that occupy the bottom margin of the canvas, is that it situates us in the middle of the narrative and prompts us to ask, “How did we get here?” and “How will it end?” These questions are inherent in all of Bradford’s work.
The term deep image was coined in the early 1960s by American poets Jerome Rothenberg and Robert Kelly to describe their own writing style, which was characterized by a resonant and heroic tone, unexpected juxtapositions, and surrealist leaps. It was a style inspired as much by Charles Olson’s projectivism as by the cante jondo or deep song and the poetry of Federico García Lorca.
For Rothenberg, the deep image poem reflected two realities: first, the empirical world of the naïve realist of what we know; second, the hidden floating world of what is to be discovered. The first world both hides and leads into the second, which in turn as a lure and a repository of dreams. For Rothenberg, deep work is perception and vision, and the poem is the movement between them. For Bradford, paint is instead the vehicle.
At 76, Bradford’s personal and empathic style of figurative abstraction dives deep into human psyche. Over the years she has introduced themes that range from Superman and swimmers to Titanic-like ocean liners. As a master mark-maker with a five-inch brush, her work has been placed in the broad context of Abstract Expressionism. I think it pleases Bradford that we can approach her work from an abstract point of view, but the very complex and deeply psychological pictures tell us more influences are afoot.
Bradford may be a more direct artistic descendant of the late, great Elizabeth Murray, who famously brought subject matter back into abstraction. Bradford also channels Joan Brown, whose work conveyed a kind of ipso facto feminism. And Bradford borrows the poetic excess found in the paintings by Alice Neel. In all cases, Bradford has learned from the best, composed on her own, and developed an impeccable instinct.
