77-year-old contemporary artist, Katherine Bradford, is known for her luminous paintings which merge abstraction with representational motifs. Born in 1942 in New York, NY, she divides her time between Brooklyn, NY and Brunswick, ME.
“The art world is relatively speaking a very tiny world and success within it doesn’t count for much outside its perimeters,” she told Art of Choice. “I remember the many members of my family cowering in the corner of the big gallery space at my opening wondering what the Hell was going on – so many people embracing something that was so foreign to them.”
“Believe it or not the whole time I’ve been an artist I’ve felt extremely excited by every small triumph along the way,” she says. “My first solo show was at Corsican Pizza in Brunswick Maine where I lived at the time. It was a thrilling experience to me. Someone bought one of the pieces. She was a friend. I was overjoyed. Basically to have people understand you and embrace what you are doing is deeply satisfying at any level.”
Today, many years later, Bradford’s works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Smith College Museum in Maine, the Worcester Museum of Art, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, among others. But she also shares her works on her Instagram page. “Because I am now 77 years old, no longer teach a regular class and am no longer raising a family I can go to the studio every day, all day. It’s heaven,” she says.
“Sometimes when I look at certain paintings I say to myself woh I wish I’d done that,'” she admits. “So, yes, I’d like to move my work forward – toward more freedom and a more distinctive approach.”
Here are some highlights from her Instagram page.
