Elizabeth Bradford’s Paintings Capture Vanishing Wilderness Next Door
Davidson artist has watched as development closes in around her
Elizabeth Bradford’s paintings celebrate untamed nature with a riot of bold acrylic paint, vibrant colors, intricate details and interlocking geometric shapes. The artist’s zoomed-in hyper focus imbues scenes we often overlook — creek beds, riverbanks and thickets of weeds — with a fragile alien beauty.
“Vivid, tangled, disorienting at times and wild,” is how Lia Rose Newman, director and curator of the Davidson College Art Galleries, describes the 23 large canvasses that comprise Warp Weft Water Weeds, a solo exhibition of Bradford’s recent work currently showing at Davidson College’s Van Every/Smith Galleries through April 9.
Bradford’s familiar-looking yet otherworldly art is all the more striking because she paints from life — scenes she’s encountered while backpacking in the mountains of North Carolina and Virginia, or after stepping off the porch of her family farm, an island of green amid a sea of burgeoning development on Davidson-Concord Road on Davidson.
“The pace of development here is so intense,” Bradford says from her 90-year old farmhouse on the property that her great-grandfather bought in 1890. “I’ve been told that 29,000 cars go past my house a day.”
She’s heard of plans to widen Highway 73, which will bring the number of cars barreling past her property to 40,000.
Like many who appreciate the wild, Bradford also dreads climate change, the vanishing of undeveloped lands in towns like hers, and the encroaching destruction of America’s national parks spearheaded by the venal Trump administration.
“My work comes from a pure place of grief for what we have lost, [and] fear for what we are continuing to lose,” Bradford says.
Ironically, being in that vanishing nature is one of the only antidotes to that grief and fear, she offers. In that way, her work acts as both therapy and archival documentation.
“[My] paintings are records of things that I consider cures for pain. If I’m really grieved and I go out into the wilderness, it just shrinks problems down to their proper scale, thrown up against the enormity of the wild world.”
Bradford studied art at a number of North Carolina schools: Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, UNC Charlotte, and Davidson College. She counts among her earliest influences the post impressionists and Georgia O’Keeffe.
“[O’Keeffe] was a woman artist when there were very few who were getting any … recognition,” Bradford notes. “I gravitated to her bridging of nature and abstraction.”
Through the years, Bradford’s preferred medium has shifted from colored pencils to gouache to acrylic paint.
“I moved to acrylic because it gave me more power, more range,” Bradford says. “I can work as big as I want. It’s fast-drying [and] you can go back over it 50,000 times. It’s the servant of the artist.”
Recently, Bradford’s inspirations have shifted to Black artists like painters Kehinde Wiley, Amy Sherald and Mickalene Thomas, sculptor Nick Cave and the Gee’s Bend quiltmakers
“The patterning [of Black art] fascinates me, that and the rhythm of it,” Bradford says. She’s also drawn to earth art, where people use bulldozers to make art out of the earth.
“The medium is the earth,” Bradford says.
Untamed places on gallery walls
“I always know what to title a piece” says Bradford, who is a writer as well as an artist. “But for this show, I was completely confounded.”
After Bradford tested several options, her daughter-in-law Su Barber, who would later design the program/book that accompanies the exhibit, suggested Warp Weft Water Weeds.
“The warp/weft refers to the relationship to weaving in [Bradford’s] work — overlapping vines and branches,” writes Newman.
As for the water and weeds in the title, they’re on ample display in several of the paintings in the exhibit.
“[Bradford’s] works like ‘Summer in the Pasture’ can feel somewhat disorienting, with their intricate layers of twisted, woven branches, grasses and leaves painted in a slightly unnatural palette of hot pink, bright yellow, neon orange and sky blue,” writes Newman in the Warp Weft Water Weeds book.
Bradford says her colors are deliberately exaggerated and pushed to extremes.
“It just makes the work more fun for me to make and more fun for people to look at,” she says.
The twisted branches that Newman notes in Bradford’s paintings are an example of the artist’s manipulation of geometry.
“I have become as interested in the negative spaces as I am in the positive spaces, and I give them equal emphasis,” Bradford says. “If you’re drawing a bare-limbed tree, everywhere the limbs fork, they form a triangle. If you think about each of those triangles as important geometric forms, that alters the way the picture gets read.”
Viewers are often struck by the size of Bradford’s paintings.
“Women, particularly from my generation, are not supposed to take up space and are not supposed to be outspoken,” says Bradford, who is 74. “I … realized late in life that I [would stop] following that cultural mandate. So, that’s why the scale.”
Attendees of the Van Every/Smith Galleries show will see 23 large-scale, colorful paintings arranged in a non-chronological pattern designed to help them move through it smoothly like so many creeks featured in Bradford’s work.
“It’s like looking out of 23 windows into nature,” Newman writes.
A haven for art, a message for the future
Elizabeth Bradford grew up not far from the family farm in her parents’ home in Huntersville. After graduating from Chapel Hill with a degree in English, she moved into the abandoned farm house in 1975.
“I grew up loving the house and felt drawn to it,” Bradford says. “It was quiet, beautiful and well-maintained until my grandparents died, so I had great memories of it being a special place.”
Cattle and crops are still being raised on a portion of the family farm that was inherited by her brother, who also opened the Bradford General Store, now run by a family friend, on the property.
Today Bradford paints in her studio in a renovated cotton barn on the farm. Although she has participated in artist residencies at Moulin à Nef in Auvillar, France; Skopart Foundation in Skopelos, Greece; and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she’s content to live out her life on the farm.
“I’m pretty rooted,” says Bradford, who has raised three sons on the farm. “I intend to stay here. I [also] intend to continue exploring, going to wonderful places all around the world and bringing those ideas and that visual stimulus back with me. It informs the way I look at the native land.”
She hopes that people who visit Warp Weft Water Weeds will come away with reverence for the land.
“I want people to be reminded of their inheritance,” Bradford says. “We are the very fortunate inheritors of a spectacular world, and I want people to realize that … we’re in charge of taking care of it.”
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Newman notes that Bradford’s work, though inspired by environmental concerns, is comforting.
“I think people want to surround themselves with beauty right now,” Newman writes. “It’s not about putting our heads in the sand, but sitting in the gallery gives you the feeling of being immersed in nature.”
Newman cites research that has found that experiencing nature — even just through photos or paintings — is good for people’s mental health. At the same time, Bradford’s wild, weird and woven work does serve as a call to action.
“We could all back Greenpeace,” Bradford says. “We could stand up when the time comes for the National Forest to be deforested by the government. [Do] whatever you see in your world that can make something better, even if it’s small.”
There are millions of significant actions that can be taken to protect the precious wild, says Bradford, and every one of them makes a difference.
