Bradford Johnson

To Extremes: Public Art in A Changing World, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 38 SIGNS 38 BEACHES 38 YEARS : According to accepted estimates, Global sea level has risen approximately 18 centimeters (7.1 inches) in the past century. Climate models predict an additional rise of 48 cm (18.9 in.) by 2100 which is more than double the rate of rise for the 20th century. To bring attention to the impact that sea level rise will have on shoreline degradation, 38 screen-painted signs will be posted on beach sites indicating where advancing mean high tide marks could be 38 years from now (in 2050). Each of these signs will be installed on 38 public and residential beaches throughout Cape Cod and the Islands. MIT Cambridge MA, Maseeh Hall. Exhibit on display April 20-29, 2012 (details at toextremes.org)

The Conversions paintings grew out of a series of documentary photographs taken by five Protestant Evangelical missionaries slain in the jungles of Ecuador in 1957. These missionaries attempted to contact a small, hostile and isolated tribe known as the Aucas (Huaorani). News of the men’s disappearance, and the subsequent discovery of their speared bodies became a media sensation in the United States. Along with personal effects recovered at the site of their deaths, a number of cameras (both still and motion picture) were found. These produced haunting images of the three days the men spent anticipating contact with the Aucas and an initially peaceful encounter with three members of its tribe. However, the visual scope of this project ranges well beyond these photographs. Additional visual sources contrast the missionaries’ focused evangelical objective with complex political, religious and sociological histories of the Amazon and post war America. Images culled from 1950’s newsprint and copy advertisements, the Amazon field journals of Henry Water Bates, the South American paintings of Martin Johnston Heade, Sebas’ Cabinet of Natural Curiosities, 1724-1765 and etchings from the Spanish Conquest are prisms that cast a vivid spectrum of Amazonian history and American culture.

Works in the gallery are the R&D of larger paintings in the "Conversions" project now underway.

In 1897, on a barren Arctic island, photographer Nils Strindberg finally escapes the brutal cold when he slips into hypothermia. Shortly thereafter, he becomes the first member of S.A. Andree's Polar Expedition to perish. As Strindberg loses consciousness, he cannot know if his human remains or exposed film will ever be returned to civilization. His compatriots bury him in a rocky grave, and their demise soon follows his. Months earlier, in a daring attempt to explore the North Pole, Strindberg, Knut Fraenkel and Andree pilot a hydrogen balloon into the polar region under the flag of Sweden. Strindberg conscientiously documents key moments even when they crash far short of the pole and are forced to trek for months across the pack ice in an attempt to return home. The remnants of their final camp are discovered over 30 years after their deaths. Among the detritus returned to civilization are detailed diaries and 5 rolls of Strindberg's exposed film. 93 viable negatives are miraculously salvaged.

These are paintings made directly from imprints and stencils from flora and fauna. I wanted to see what would happen if the subject itself was the under-painting. I wanted preserve the thing (a herring or mackrel) by using the thing itself to make a visual record, from which I would then embellish with paint. I took a one-step-removed in this idea by making elaborate stencils of photographs from a 1920’s taxidermic pamphlet. These mounts (trout, buck deer, passenger pigeons) also strive for a kind of fidelity to specimens taken from the natural world.

With these lost or overlooked landscapes I continued to explored what could be done with ben day dot matrixes and paint. Source photo's for these paintings range from Cape Cod beaches of my childhood to a picture taken in the 50's pasture in Woodstock Ct,to a distant Scandinavian island swum to by a friend and later day photographed sites that Cezanne painted. All of these are as remote and as beguiling to me as the diminutive "Visit New England" sugar packets torn open in local diners.

What if, in an attempt to hybridize a painting and a photographic image, I enlarged the photo to the point that it's constituent "ben day" dots were obvious. I wanted to find a way to make these dots a constant throughout the painted process, an index of the photographic record. My solution was to experiment with huge hand cut stencils of these dots, that I then spread medium and paint through in order to build up thickly nubbed surfaces. The point of all this was to make a painting who's DNA is locked into a photograph.

This work's a study in paint of a long ago photographic records. Though built up through many layers of clear acrylic medium and paint on silvered panel, the painting's are stripped down and involve primarily with the negative/background space in the composition. Many of the sources from this work are the earliest pictures taken. They are darkened windows through which I tried to see (and reconstitute) the distant passed.

Following the events of 911 and the start of the Iraq War, display of the American flag became a regular feature of my visual environment. These images of flags are closely cropped from a series photographs of the flag raised on the the island of Iwo Jima in WW II.

Boat's seen at a distance on the water always evoke a sense of mystery for me. This is also true for maritime markers, like Nix's Mate in Boston Harbor and light houses like Portland Light in ME.

In my exploration of early photographic records, I cam across pictures of Jerusalem taken from the Mt. of Olives, in 1845. These were remarkable hand colored-black and white pictures of the Temple Mount. These early 19th c. records of Jerusalem devoid of modern contrivances or people, are striking. The process of laying paint strokes emphasizes the distance from a profoundly ancient place.

The images here are the influence of living in East Boston near Logan Int'l Airport from 2000-2002. My interest in this subject lay with jet airliners as an icons of dislocation and a shrinking globe. This specific engagement with planes was curtailed by the events of 911 when one of these planes flew from Logan to NYC.

Somewhere back in my childhood, my father brought home a sheaf of images from a military contractor. These pictures provoked a deep sense of mystery in me. Rockets shooting from the sea, a submarine held hostage by ice at the top of the world. After long years, less than archival storage (note the "stain" painted into "Skate"), I rediscovered and painted these remarkably beautiful pictures of apocalyptic machines.

Through a travel grant I was able to visit Loch Ness and fully engage my adolescent obsession it's legionary monster. Here I found no monster but was stunned with the beauty and mystery of the Highlands and it's dark loch. My paintings from photos taken there are rendered in a technique developed that build upon many thin layers clear medium interleaved with small brush strokes of paint. The closer one gets to the painting, the less defined it becomes. So I also found Loch Ness as a subject.

In the late 90's I made a transition from oil to latex paint. I pushed ideas of surface in these images of boats, embedding the image in layers of medium. The intention was to create a painted physical object of an image.

During childhood, each summer I saw a distant wreck, beached on a sand bar in Cape Cod bay. The USS Long Street was a derelict transport from WWII used for Navel target practice well into the 60's. It was a haunting sight that disintegrated a bit more with each tide and storm. In later years I photographed and painted it on unstretched canvas. This lead to a whole body of work based on documentary photographs of shipwrecks and rescues at sea.

Some of these paintings are based on a hand carved toy boat that belonged to my grandfather (worn smooth by his childhood). The toy became the subject for my own imagined internal seascapes. During this post-grad period in NYC, I felt, at times, like a small intrepid boat, bobbing along among great looming waves. I was also ensconced in Moby Dick and enthralled with the force and power of his leviathan.

Thesis work from my graduate program at Hunter College, NYC. Deep water, dream vessels, strange shapes, photographic allusions, proof, belief and the unknown.

During my foundational year at RISD, I’d walk about with my roommate John Murphy looking for interesting cast offs and urban junk. He discovered a dumpster full of city architectural detritus and a large sheaf of inspection photographs of a water treatment site under construction. These he passed along to me and I eventually began using the black and white 8x10 glossy prints in a series of paintings. I transpose the images onto scrap boards found at building sites. These semi documentary images were my first attempts connect painting with the physical world they depicted. They became for me, personal metaphors of construction and deconstruction.

In the late 80's I returned to the books of my childhood; yellowed-pulpy paperbacks that set out enthusiastic proofs and claims of the Loch Ness Monsters' existence. I contrived to paint the pages from these books in the same way I poured over them as a kid. Reading into the fuzzy pages more than they could perhaps possibly bear.