summer is right around the corner starting off with a bang opening 3 incredible exhibitions for north carolina painters elizabeth bradford, page laughlin, and brian coleman. landscapes, figurative and abstract could not be more diverse but seeing them hung in the gallery together exhibits a range of depth. each artists is hyperfocused on their own exploration delving deep into their subject matters whether it is the land surrounding them, the female figure in labor or pure abstraction. big thank you to each of elizabeth, page + brian for allowing us to exhibit their amazing talent.
elizabeth bradford is a native carolinian, with deep roots in the rural landscape. her work often centers on images drawn from her rural community and her family’s century farm in north mecklenburg county. In recent years she has used her passion for backpacking as inspiration for large scale paintings of the wild.
bradford studied art at randolph macon woman’s college, the universities of north carolina, and at davidson college. she is represented in corporate and private collections all over the united states. she was included in the us state department’s art in embassies program, which places representative work by american artists in embassies around the world.
bradford was chosen as the featured artist for north carolina’s first statewide women’s conference. she has had many solo exhibitions, including shows at the university of north carolina at charlotte, davidson college, hood college, the blowing rock museum and the cameron art museum.
her work focuses on intricate formal patterns found in nature, and on the experience of color. It serves as a call to action to preserve and protect the natural world and expresses a deep reverence for wild places. currently her medium is acrylic on canvas. though representational, her paintings have a strong connection to the traditions of abstraction. bradford’s paintings reveal a continuing investigation of landscape and the notion of place.
born into a world of post war farming, i now live and work in an urban, technological south.
during most of my adult life i have had to watch the loss of open spaces, the harvesting of old forests and the construction of thousands of new houses—the “final harvest”. i could not escape recording the land as i remember it and as it can still be found—in hidden pockets of the forests, undisturbed, holding forth.
beyond their literal interpretation, my paintings stand in for states of mind and heart that transcend place. they are about human life on earth, the story written with a vocabulary of trees and creeks, limbs and stones. our entanglements and confusions, our love and reverence are represented by things I find in the forest. to get at the sacred nature of it all i invent color and exploit pattern.
my influences are many, including everything from women’s needlework to neil welliver, specifically his subject matter and the back and forth play between representation and abstraction. i cultivate a flatness that is reminiscent of pop art, and i can’t deny a connection to the visual play of op art. all the movements of my lifetime have had their effect.
i see my heavily worked paintings as a kind of tapestry. we are a culture in hyperdrive, but we are not so far removed from the traditions that served us for millennia. when work began to turn an old barn on my farm into my studio, my great-grandmother’s spinning wheel was still stored inside. so just as i am echoing my great-grandfather’s grooming of his land, i am echoing my great-grandmother’s spinning and weaving.
i have come to believe that i am painting the permanent— that wildness will never be fully controlled. with my work i want to build an alternate universe that allows us to step inside and wander endlessly, a universe inspired by the wild untameable generosity of the natural world.
-elizabeth bradford
page laughlin was born and raised in richmond va. she received her undergraduate degree from the university of virginia where she was an echols scholar, phi beta kappa and a member of psi chi national honor society. her graduate degree is from the rhode island school of design where she received a mfa in painting in 1985. she has exhibited in galleries across the country and her paintings are in numerous private and public collections including secca, the north carolina museum of art, the mint museum, nexus, and the virginia museum of art. in 2007, she was awarded a north carolina art council fellowship, and she was a nominee for usa artist fellowship. currently, her painting "mirror, mirror," is on exhibit in the permanent collection of the north carolina museum of art in their new west building. page laughlin lives, works,and paints in winston-salem, nc, where she is professor of art and a reinsch pierce faculty fellow at wake forest university.
the paper doll series emerged from my interest in harnessing the detached coolness of digital processes (from photo, to scan, to photoshop, to print) in order to generate a drawing to be printed for my paintings. the digital print i seek provides a linear rendering that is neither a digital trace nor a hand-drawn gesture, but a hybrid between the two. this quality is a subtlety, a movement between binary and non-binary, that is echoed again in the relationships between the gestural, indeterminate quality of oil painting and the determined topology of the digital rendering. this dialogue between fixed/mutable, intention/accident, machine made/handmade, binary/non-binary, certain/uncertain has always informed my artistic practice.
the paper doll series is certainly a tongue-in-cheek reference to child’s play. the paper doll reference is to the format, media, and subject of these paintings. these are relatively large paintings and digital print hybrids, created on sheets of paper, sourced from a 50-yard roll. the paper provides a structural ease for changing scale and impact; it, quite literally, can be cut up and added to. the paper also conveys an undercurrent of informality or, more insidiously, of disposability. the digitally generated line drawing is a further reference to a coloring book, a surface designed to force the recognition of, if not the reconciliation within, the conflict between free agency and external control.
the paper doll series are images of individual women engaged in simple acts of traditional domestic labor: folding laundry, watering, digging, etc. these acts, simple, essential, by hand, are my visual and conceptual focus. the grand traditions of these acts in art addressing issues of class and gender provide a given framework that underlies a more dominant interest in examination of loss of hand, loss of access to labor, a loss of simple agency.
-page laughlin
brian coleman received his degree in graphic design from the art institute of charlotte. he has been a practicing artist since 2003.
“i draw because i need to, i always have, and it is a form of therapy for me. they are pieces and parts of life - memories, out of space happenings, free drawing in the moment, recurring images I have used in previous works that have told other stories. i am always building the surface, changing direction and rearranging on a journey to explore the space on the canvas; the drawing comes alive and starts to move and grow, gaining substance. the images are pieces and parts of the past, present and future, in the process of becoming something else. the works become stories of their own, they come together to become another place in time, they are not made to make sense, they are made to evoke feelings. i am never arriving at a place, and i am constantly using my pieces and parts in the process of a journey that never ends.”
he lives and works in mooresville, nc with his wife, son, and daughter.
all available work by elizabeth bradford, page laughlin + brian coleman can be viewed on our website on the artist page under their individual tab. click on their name to bring up all available paintings with sizing and pricing. please call the gallery if you have any further questions.