Photo: Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of Art

What a lovely two hours! I really enjoy Bradford’s work so looking at slides of a survey of his work currently on view at the Wexner Center for the Arts was great, but it was his energetic personality and down to earth take on life that was the pleasant surprise. Bor nin 1961, Bradford grew up in Santa Monica but his mother’s hair salon was in South Central Los Angeles. Before becoming a visual artist 10 years ago, he was also a hairdresser for twenty years.

Bradford’s large-scale works deal with racial and economic issues and his work has been included in major exhibitions across the globe. In his short career he has won many major awards including the pretigious Bucksbaum from the Whitney Museum in 2006. Bradford traveled a lot in his 20s and he always enjoyed turning experiences into abstract events. While in Muslim communities, he preferred to round the corner to listen to prayers as opposed to seeing images of the people. He attempts to turn everything into an abstraction by isolating details and fragments which lead to something quite different in both his life and in his art work. Standing at 6 foot 8 inches from the age of 15, people often tried to label him so he tried to put a spin on that and change the situation by brodening people’s views of him. Based on his own experience being boxed into the isolation of South Central as well as his globetrotting, Bradford examines themes of place and identities associated with place in his paintings. He does not steer clear of ifficult topics in his work, in fact, he feels he cuts right to the chase and confronts these issues head on in a David and Goliath type manner.

His work is filled with repetition and gestural lines that are covered over with twine and paper that he sands. He is constantly attempting to get rid of the mark of the hand and gesture of the artist. He effectively paints with paper using a painting vocabulary but paper as his medium. He used to predominantly use found paper but as a response to the increase of the digital age, he now has paper made in order to use it in his works. He went from 100% of materials from the street to now roughly 30%. Paper from the streets carries social messages with it that demonstrates the climate of a community at a certain time so he is very selective about what he gathers as materials. Early works utilize end papers used in salons on hair. This material gave him a platform from which he could comfortably jump. With influences like Agnes Martin, Jackson Pollock, Brice Marden, Mimmo Rotella and Phillip Guston, Bradford is aware of how art history factors into his creations but he has a strong yearning to create his own thing, not to replicate anyone else’s line or process. He has used bleach, a caulking gun and sanders in his art making. Paper is less forgiving than paint. He recognizes that there is a certain amount destruction that will occur in the creation of his paintings because he is using imprecise tools–he likes that imperfection.

Bradford not only maps the temperature of the culture of a particular area, he also looks at works as maps–there is a definite topographical nature to a lot of his work. Self-proclaimed to be obsessed with structure and order, he uses line in his work to rein him in from chaos. He always makes a preparatory drawing and then builds upon that using string to create some relief. Next he layers papers and uses them as a painter uses the brush and paint–certain areas are translucent or opaque or certain colors. Once that is laid down he uses sanders of different sizes to erase areas. This helps him get back to the order of the work. He loads a work with social information and “detritus” and as he sands, he attempts to bring forth the conversation about painting instead of all of the other aspects of the work.

As Christopher Bedford, the curator of exhibitions at the Wexner Center who has most recently worked with Bradford, told the audience, Mark Bradford has a strong work ethic. He goes to the studio every day, arriving early and staying late. He has a tremendous body of work for only 10 years of production. Bradford does not see what he does as work per se. It is the practice of being an artist that he loves. He learns from every work he creates and he seems to take all of the hoopla surrounding him in stride. He does not forget the salon he grew up in as it is a part of him. My favorite thing he said is that it baffles him when people ask, “How do people in the hair salon react to your work?” His response is, “Like everyone else.”