One of the perks of Instagram is that you can follow your favorite visual artists online and walk through their virtual gallery at ease. Katherine Bradford is one such artist. Based in New York, she began her career as a painter relatively late in life and has achieved her widest recognition in her seventies, which means there’s still hope for all of us!
Exhibited internationally and in shows at prestigious galleries and museums like the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (solo), MoMA PS1, and Brooklyn Museum, Bradford is recognized for her paintings of swimmers, superheroes and ships that are both representational and richly metaphorical. “I’m interested in making paintings that are about something bigger than everyday life,” she once remarked in an interview with Hyperallergic, “something very universal. I’m making larger paintings now, and I’d like them to be about very broad themes.”
A self-taught artist, as well as a late bloomer, Bradford admits it was hard for her to come to terms with her artistic passion. “I was really in the closet about how deeply I felt about making paintings,” she observed. “The barn was my studio,” she adds. “I was doing mark-making paintings. I had not gone to art school or taken any foundation classes. So my idea of painting was to dip the brush in paint and put it on the canvas.”
It was only when she was 37 (and despite considerable disapproval from her family), that Bradford moved to New York City as a single mother to pursue art in closer contact with contemporary painting discourse, eventually enrolling in graduate studies. You’d want to follow her work on Instagram, for the art itself, but also for the creative inspiration.
