courtesy Elizabeth Bradford (ART)
ART
Pamlico Sound Bank
SUPER NATURAL Davidson artist Elizabeth Bradford celebrates the beauty of the wild by LIZA ROBERTS
I
n a former cotton shed in Mecklenburg County, Elizabeth Bradford paints the natural world around her. With extraordinary, saturated colors and meticulous, zoomedin details, her landscapes can be exotic, surprising, even strange. They are also poetic: meditative celebrations of the beauty, interconnectedness and geometry of the natural world.
On canvases nearly as tall as she is, Bradford takes countless hours over many weeks to paint the magic she finds in nature. Sometimes it’s an eddy of water. Sometimes it’s the messy bank of a receded river, where roots protrude and collide. Trees, fields, ponds, creeks: Bradford finds wonderlands in them all. Representational, but with deep, twisting tentacles into abstraction, her canvases
beg the viewer to look hard. In January 2023, Hidell Brooks Gallery in Charlotte, which first exhibited her work in 1998, will host a new exhibition of her art. Wilmington’s Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington exhibited a powerful one-woman show of Bradford’s work, entitled A House of One Room, in 2021. Her paintings are also in the permanent collections of the Mint Museum The Art & Soul of Raleigh | 23
