Born 1949, Wilmington, DE
Lives and works in Leonia, NJ
John Bradford received his BFA from Cooper Union in 1971 and MFA from Yale University School of Art in 1978. He is the 2011 recipient of prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Painting. John Bradford’s work has been reviewed in the New York Times, New York Magazine, New Criterion, ArtNews, Village Voice, the Jewish Press and Hudson Review.
About his work, Bradford says: "I employ violent scraping, palette knifing, dabbing, dripping, reducing, tearing apart, cutting through, and building up so the paint overwhelms with something very specific, yet distantly remembered from somewhere else. This process of abstracting and excavating these oft–told American histories simultaneously asserts my formal, absolute control of the surface and allows me to retreat from the field. At the end of the process, I want to leave an open space to enjoy in which different takes, sensibilities, and meanings can live."