Finding beauty in the odd: Whimsical painter brings new life to the Triangle
Painter Elizabeth Bradford has had a busy year. She had a residency in France last April and has just installed two shows at The Umstead Hotel and Spa in Cary and The Mahler in Raleigh. Last week, we met Bradford at The Umstead to talk about her art, her love for nature and what gets her "fired up."
Between installations and travel, Bradford is an avid hiker and backpacker who uses her outdoor adventures to create whimsical, acrylic paintings that she hopes will reveal the beauty in the unexpected.
Bradford, who grew up in the then-tiny town of Huntersville, largely credits her mom when it comes to her passion for painting.
"It was a quiet little town with nothing going on," said Bradford. "Where I grew up, it was an uncommon thing to have so much exposure to art. But my mom was a hyper-visual supremely artistic person. She had exquisite taste -- whether we had money or not, our home was beautiful. I clearly remember she took me out of school one day and drove me all the way to Raleigh to go to the art museum, and I will never forget that day. I don't think she ever realized how much of a product of her everything I did is. We all still talk about how she impacted us."
Bradford's exhibitions feature fairytale-like landscapes with abstract colors. She describes her paintings as quirky, whimsical and sometimes psychedelic.
"They're personal and they're mysterious," said Bradford. "I don't love being called a landscape painter, because that's so limiting. I would say what I do is sort of existential landscape -- it's sort of about human life but the vocabulary is stones and trees and moss and rocks. It's about human life and what it's like to be in the world."
Bradford decided she wanted to paint nature 15 years ago when she put herself through an experiment she called "her own personal graduate school."
"I decided I was going to do a painting every day for a year," said Bradford. "They would be small enough to fit in a backpack with my paints and brushes. I took that backpack everywhere I went with me, and I painted everything. I painted dreams, I painted my kids, some pans on the stove, cans of soup and my bedroom quilt. I looked at all the paintings at the end of that year and realized what really sets me off is nature. Every painting I had done by a creek or in the woods was beautiful and filled with joy, and I knew that was I was supposed to do."
To foster her creativity, Bradford spends as much time as she can outside.
"When I retired, I decided I wanted to have a life more actively engaged in nature," said Bradford. I've always been a camper, but I wanted to try some ultra-light backpacking. "I would come back from these trips with my head full of images that would become paintings."
Some of Bradford's paintings are based on what sticks in her head, but she takes pictures on every camping trip or hike that she can use to paint later.
"I have a teeny tiny camera that screws onto my hiking stick, so without stopping the hike, I take pictures," said Bradford. "I have taken over 30,000 photographs."
According to Bradford, she has only painted one sunset in her career. "I love to take pictures of things that aren't ordinarily beautiful and render them beautiful," she said. "Instead of painting flowers, I want to paint the tree roots and the weeds. I want us to see the beauty of the fallen leaves when they are brown and on the ground, not just when they are orange and stuck to the tree. It's about finding the beauty in the things we don't normally consider beautiful."
Bradford, who is a mother to three, told me about the early days in her art career, when she was still trying to find her stride.
"I painted a lot when I was a stay-at-home-mom. Everybody had to take naps so I could paint," Bradford laughed. "Everyone knew when you woke up from your nap you came down to the studio and that's where you'd find mom. Painting and being a mom are the two things I love the most."
When Bradford's children got older, she worked as a high school art teacher. To make time for painting while she had a full-time job, Bradford said she set up a little workspace in her bedroom so she could paint before bed even when she was tired.
Her advice for new artists? "If you work on something a lot, everything you do is better than what you did before -- even just your third drawing or painting," said Bradford. "One day, painting 3,001 will be better than your 3,000."
Bradford's exhibits will be up at The Umstead through July 31, and in that time, she said she hopes to impact the people who walk by her art.
"I think I have a mission to sensitize people to the beauty of the earth," said Bradford. "It's all about the environment for me, that's my political cause, that's what I donate money to, that's what gets me fired up. A lot of people live very interior lives, and our children do too, and one of my missions is to entice people to look outside and go explore. Usually, if you just get five minutes off the interstate, you can be deep in nature. It's amazing, like two universes have collided."
Elizabeth will hold a discussion about her art at The Umstead on April 18. A reception will be held at The Mahler in Raleigh on April 12.
