Bradford Johnson

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.