Kay Bradner's recent oil paintings of boats and water on scored aluminum have the feel of the super-real in deep space. The paintings, like a sunrise, celebrate the delicate balance between randomness and order: creating a kind of beauty that both surprises and
reassures when we see it in nature.
Bradner looks at her history as a painter as an unending series of experiments: a poetic search that is simultaneously technical and artistic. Her compass has been the moments where the colors, the tools and the images resonate: where they feel 'true' inside.
There is a feeling of recognition. Each aspect of this series of boat paintings on scored aluminum reflects this search.
The aluminum, thin and flat, is an unbounded image plane like our unbounded view of the world. The color, rich and vibrant, reflects the emotional impact of color rather than a reporting of reality. Oil paint, applied with a broom or a trowel, gives a bounty of
detail, random but with a subtle orderliness that comes from the physical laws of nature. These laws control the drying of oil paint with lots of solvent as much as it controls the formation of clouds. The hand of the painter is hidden in the seeming accidents.
Bradner scribes the underpainting with a craft knife making a groove and a ridge of aluminum. She rubs paint into the groove and the ridge catches paint as though it were a drypoint making a wide dark line with a fine tracing in the middle. This creates the impact of the separateness of an object without loosing the precision of the division. Led by the serendipitous or planned juxtapositions of line and underpainting, Bradner paints judiciously, teasing light and depth from the painting without destroying the happy accidents. The finished works have a freshness of found, not made, images: the reality loosely defined, leaving to the viewer's imagination the leap to credulity.
Painting boats comes naturally to Kay. She grew up next to a lake and waterfall in Massachusetts and, in San Francisco, lives high on a hill, surrounded by water.
Biography
Introductions
2006 exhibition
Artist's
Web Site
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