Michelle Bradford Lets The Colors Flow

“When I was 12 years old, my dad took me to the Louvre. I remember standing in the portrait section and thinking, ​‘Yes, this is what I want to do.’” said Michelle Bradford last Wednesday night, surrounded by friends and family. That vivid memory of knowing — really knowing — that she wanted to be an artist still strikes her when she stands in front of a canvas or smells the sticky, dank residue of oil paint.

For a long time, she channeled it as a portrait painter. ​“That’s how I got my start,” she said. ​“I was doing portrait commissions.” She also designed 3D characters for video games. Then, after taking time off for her daughter’s birth, she was struck with the urge to try something different.

“I’ve always been really into color, and I just started playing with some of the color schemes that were my favorite,” she said. ​“In 2014 I did City Wide Open Studios, and that was my first series of abstracts. They were very different from these — very controlled, and I was using a lot of shapes and balance. This series was really letting go, kind of taking those colors and laying them down and seeing what happened.”

The result of that letting go is the subject of her new exhibition at 116 Crown, provisionally titled ​“Abstracts in Oil” by bar owner John Ginnetti and ​“Flow” by the artist herself. Last Wednesday evening, it opened to a packed house, the clink of glasses mingling with bubbly laughter and half-finished conversations as attendees stopped to admire paintings along the exposed brick walls. 

The 10 abstract oils and four small pen and ink drawings situated at the front of the bar tell a dynamic story of transition. In visual terms, let’s say Edgar Degas has walked in on late-career Gerhard Richter kissing Helen Frankenthaler hard on the mouth, and they have had a good laugh about it. Pieces such as Forsythia & Grey (2014) delight and intrigue in subdued hues. Others, such as Thaw, burst into springtime with explosive dawn pink and hazy oranges and dripping aquamarines. For Bradford, it’s about floating fluidly between those colors, as she still does between portraiture and abstraction.

“A color will inspire me that I see in the day,” she said. ​“I have a library of color schemes in my head. It’s very specific — not just red, the perfect red. Whatever mood I’m in that day, I’ll pick that color scheme and then I’ll start just laying paints on and let it drip. I’ll sit back and watch it. Whatever that does, I’ll then respond to that with something else. It’s sort of this conversation I have with the paint until it feels finished.”

The designs of her four pen and ink pieces also jump out at viewers from where they are candlelit in a brick niche. Reminiscent of Daniel Eugene’s ​“spiritual vitamins” in pen and ink, these capture the best of the artistic universe. They are introspective and jubilant, pensive and free-form, serious and whimsical. Meditation (pictured below), for instance, comes from a year of what Bradford describes as ​“doodling” while she was on the phone or playing cards with her husband.

No Agenda

Bradford doesn’t paint the compositions with a specific visual agenda, and she doesn’t believe in pushing one onto her viewers, either. In the right light, the viewer might see any number of things in her paintings: an intimation of the human eye, peeking out from behind a thick swoop of taupe; the wink of a sunset; tempered meditations on Jackson Pollock’s technique. They are Bradford’s love songs to color field artists and aggressive abstract painters alike, without diluting the tradition of portraiture from which she came.

“I see this as an introduction to me starting to put my artwork out there. My goal was to have 10 works that I could show … I’ve finally reached that point and I want to keep going and see what happens.”

Ginnetti was drawn to the pieces for the same reason.

“We went to the studio, we liked the work, we set a date,” he said. ​“The colors were not only nice for the space, but seasonally appropriate for spring. Just take today: it started out with this brilliant sunshine, and now it’s raining and windy. Those pieces — if you can’t find raindrops on the window and sunshine, you’re just not looking hard enough.”

He was right. Outside, rain spattered the windows, running steadily down their faces. Inside, the paintings morphed into wet streets, wide fields, open skies with pregnant stormclouds and promising expanses of blue. Together, they would take New Haven, drip by drip, into spring. 

“Michelle Bradford: Abstracts in Oil” will be up for several months at 116 Crown.