Bradford Johnson

About

Bradford Johnson has been painting now for nearly three decades, exhibitingextensively in both solo and group exhibitions and garnering acknowledgements andawards from such prestigious organizations as the Pollock-Krasner Foundation andrepeated fellowships at the MacDowell & Yaddo Artist Colonies.

From his studio in Somerville MA, he’s engaged the daily media feed of devastation that humans have inflicted on the environment. The unrelenting news cycle of endings, extinction, apocalypse, collapse.

But Bradford Johnson’s work takes a longer and deeper view - revisiting landscapesthat have been continuously altered by humans over centuries, showing the surprisingways in which they’ve continue to evolve. Here he looks for a resiliency that haspreceded us and can endure.

HIs images are built-up like the layers of human engagement with a place. Landscapesand artifacts bearing evidence of our consumption and trade, myth and ritual, and evenrestoration. Underneath his work lays religious and humanistic themes—often called “first-level” questions: who are we, where do we come from, why are we here, what has gone wrong, where are we going?

Bradford Johnson has been painting now for nearly three decades and has exhibited extensively in both solo and group exhibitions—garnering acknowledgements and awards from such prestigious organizations as the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and MacDowell Artist Colony. Throughout this time he has focused in an unembarrassed way on major religious and humanistic themes—often called “first-level” questions: who are we, where do we come from, why are we here, what has gone wrong, where are we going? Artists and philosophers have been asking these things since the beginning of human community—and more recently have posed even more poignant queries: why are we perpetually at war, why is there such suffering if there is a good God. Why?

In Johnson’s work there seems always to be element of immanent danger and potential or actual disaster. Images of wrecked zeppelins, ships, airplanes, and balloons alongside ordinary human activities; indicators of aspiration and failure, calamity and hope—and all of Johnson’s paintings seem overlaid with time and memory. His work participates directly and indirectly in the vanitas tradition—in which images point toward our finitude, our mortality, and the vanity of overweening human ambitions. Yet Johnson’s paintings are never preachy—never didactic…always allusive and multi-layered, they are open to multiple interpretations.

In the current exhibition there is plenty of the above: disaster, tragedy, radical contingency, and a sustained meditation on the fragility and brevity of life, particularly as it is lived out for others: in the example of Nate Saint, Jim Elliot and Edward McCully - revered members of the Wheaton community as missionaries who were considered as martyrs for the Christian faith. But there is also a surprise element we’ve never seen before in this artist’s oeuvre: images of popular culture, commercial brands, poster art and movie stills, oddments of the entertainment industry and ephemera of a particular time period: all from the years surrounding the killing of Elliot, Saint et al by the Auca (known as The Huaorani) the potentially jarring juxtaposition of home-movie footage stills, personal photos, grainy news images, and pop-culture signs—all of this jumbled together gives the viewer an unexpected sense of timelessness in the midst of very particular time-bound moments. It is as though we become strangers to our own lives as we see time and eternity mix and separate.

Without a single religious platitude and without resorting to propaganda of any sort, the artist moves us into a receptive space—ready to see how God’s work is accomplished in the silences, in the caesuras, in the seemingly meaningless gaps between clear narrative and random image. We see an entire era through a haze of pictures and yet gain insight into a particular life through the artist’s sure touch—seeing finally that the drama of a martyr’s tale is most honestly glimpsed in the flux of ordinary time: God with us in the humdrum and workaday. And alongside those we think to call martyrs or fools we become saints and strangers in the unfolding tableaux—working out our salvation with fear and trembling in the passing moments.

 Bruce Herman,  

Gloucester, September 2015