we are so thrilled for gallery artist elizabeth bradford whose solo exhibition warf weft water weed is opening tonight at the van every smith galleries at davidson college. when our dear friend and artist herb jackson told us we needed to go visit elizabeth in her studio a while back because “she was the jackson pollack of landscape painters” we immediately reach out to her. our first visit to see her paintings in person was exhilarating and we were blown away by her depictions of the land she loves and knows so well. her details hyperfocused on every aspect of nature surrounding you in the landscape bringing you into the painting by pushing the vegetation to the foreground entangling the viewer from all angles. we were in love immediately with the mesmerising brushwork and elizabeth’s distinct lens into the natural world. enjoy the preview of new paintings at the gallery, the exhibition in davidson, a wonderful interview by jay ahuja featured in southpark magazine and a podcast on southbound hosted by tommy tomlinson.
mountain laurel 2025, acrylic on canvas, 60 × 48 inches at hidell brooks
cascade, basin creek 2022, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 48 inches at hidell brooks
summer grasses 2023, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 30 inches at hidell brooks
pebble in the creek 2022, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 48 inches at hidell brooks
The Van Every/Smith Galleries are pleased to present Warp Weft Water Weeds, a solo exhibition by Elizabeth Bradford. The exhibition highlights the talent of an artist who has spent fifty years diligently working within our own community, capturing the evolving landscapes she holds dear. Over twenty monumental canvases created over the last few years will be on view, each filled with exquisite details and vibrant, pulsing colors.
Bradford often describes being in nature, whether hiking, kayaking, or painting en plein air, as “cures for pain.” Many also find solace in nature, but what happens when the places that normally bring us comfort are threatened, transformed by time, (over)development, and climate change? Though Bradford’s paintings are undeniably beautiful, with intricate details painted in vivid color, these pressing concerns lie at the heart of her work. She makes evident the wildness, weirdness, and fragility of nature, asking us to reflect on our relationship with the land, perhaps with the goal of gently guiding us to take responsibility to protect and preserve these sanctuaries.
Elizabeth Bradford (American, b. 1950) studied art at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Charlotte, and at Davidson College. She has participated in artist residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Amherst, VA; Moulin à Nef, Auvillar, France; Skopart Foundation, Skopelos, Greece; and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL.
Bradford’s many solo exhibitions include those at the Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, NC; Blowing Rock Art & History Museum, Blowing Rock, NC; the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, NC; Davidson College, Davidson, NC; and Hood College, Frederick, MD. Bradford’s work is included in museum, corporate, and private collections across the US.
Elizabeth Bradford: Warp Weft Water Weeds is accompanied by a 240-page, hardbound catalogue featuring essays from Dr. Emily Stamey, Curator of Academic Programming & Head of Exhibitions at Weatherspoon Art Museum, UNC-Greensboro; Dr. Leo Mazow, Louise B. and J. Harwood Cochrane Curator of American Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; and an interview between Bradford and Tyler Green, award-winning historian and critic who has produced and hosted The Modern Art Notes Podcast since 2011.
Short documentary on Elizabeth Bradford produced and directed by John Rash in association with Davidson College and with original score by Allison Friday.
Elizabeth Bradford paints the fabric of nature — and her inner self
This week on SouthBound, host Tommy Tomlinson talks to Davidson-based painter Elizabeth Bradford. She paints large nature scenes with lots of things happening at once, and talks about how hearing a slam poet changed her painting style.
She paints overlapping branches, thickets of weeds, ripples refracting sunlight.
It wasn’t always that way. For years, her paintings were smaller and quieter.
But one day, listening to NPR, she heard a slam poet who brought her artistic life — and her life as a woman — into focus.
Now she works with bold colors on big canvases, trying to capture everything at once.
And when she’s not wandering the woods or a river somewhere, you can find Bradford at her family’s old farm — an oasis for her and her work.
The South … What is it? Movies, books, songs, myths and legends have tried to explain this part of the United States. SouthBound, a new podcast series from WFAE, talks to people who were born and raised in the South. Hosted by journalist Tommy Tomlinson, SouthBound features conversations with notable Southerners from all walks of life – from artists and athletes to preachers and politicians.
by Jay Ahuja
Lia Rose Newman, director and curator of Van Every/Smith Galleries at Davidson College, knew it was time for a change, “Several of our more recent shows had a social-justice aspect to them, and we could use a little reprieve.” Enter Elizabeth Bradford’s Warp Weft Water Weeds solo exhibition, on view Feb. 13-April 9. In her paintings, the Davidson resident draws inspiration from outdoor settings, primarily across the Southeast.
“We had known and admired her work,” Newman says. “It expresses a deep message about conserving the land and what nature can do for us.” The exhibition is also about recognizing one of Davidson’s own. “It was important to honor her work over the past 50 years,” Newman adds.
Artist Elizabeth Bradford in her studio. Photographed by Peter Taylor in Charlotte, NC, November 19, 2024
Bradford spoke with SouthPark Magazine about her process, inspiration and being bold in her artwork.
Comments have been edited for length and clarity.
Your work is in several museums and corporate collections. Was that always a goal or just something that came about as you continued to paint?
Surely that’s a goal, to get it out into the world and to have affirmation from art historians, curators, and other artists. It’s helpful and instructive too. You learn from it. Sometimes it encourages you to be braver.
Obviously, your work is inspired by nature. How do you go about interacting with nature?
I used to just observe, but then I got engaged in backpacking. I’ve always loved camping, but I hadn’t been into ultralight backpacking so I wanted to do that in my 60s. I was just talking about it with some friends, how much I really wanted to learn how to do that. There were these two buddies of mine who said, “We do that once a month. Do you want to go with us?” So I did, and they are great naturalists and hardened campers. They know their way around the woods. They let me go with them and were patient with me and taught me so many things about how to survive in the wilderness.
And how did that lead to the art?
I’d been painting my normal environment, which was the [family farm], small town, nature around me, but once I got [out in the wilderness] it was so extravagant. The things I was seeing were so different from ordinary inhabited environment. Trees are allowed to grow there until they fall over. There are enormous trees and all kinds of lichen, mushrooms and wild orchids.
One of my camping buddies is a biologist, so he was always pointing out all these things I might have otherwise missed. He’s actually a stream specialist, which has been fun, too, to study the nature of streams. It’s just a fun deep dive to not only sleep on the Earth, but to be taught about it.
What are your favorite places to get inspiration?
We’ve been going a lot up to Wilson Creek [in Caldwell County]. It’s part of a giant park that draws trout fishermen, hunters and backpackers. There’s a huge gorge. It’s like North Carolina’s Grand Canyon. A lot of people from that area go there to spend a summer day. And there are a lot of wilderness areas — we found some places there that nobody goes much, off the beaten track.
They took me to Grayson Highlands [State Park in Virginia], but we also camped on Cumberland Island [in coastal Georgia]. We like to go to Goose Creek State Park, which is just off the Pamlico Sound. We take kayaks there. That’s super inspiring — I write about it, but I also paint it.
Some of my first more experimental landscapes were inspired after that first trip to Cumberland Island. Initially, my landscapes were couched in natural colors with a limited palette. After Cumberland, I started experimenting with extravagant color that was not drawn directly from nature. It was just so exotic that it called for something like that.
Artist Elizabeth Bradford’s studio. Photographed by Peter Taylor in Charlotte, NC, November 19, 2024
What is your process once you’ve decided to paint a subject?
Sometimes, I’ll do some pencil drawings to establish the composition. A lot of times, the paintings may revolve around something as simple as one tree — that’s sort of like a rectangle, so it becomes really tricky to make that rectangle interesting. I might move the lines of that tree trunk around 10 times with a pencil before I come to what I think is going to be engaging.
I’ll set up the basic bones of the construction of a piece with a pencil. Not always, but often. And then, a lot of times, I’ll start with the thing that is the most obvious in the foreground. Most people paint a background and then paint on top of it. I paint from the foreground back. I start with what’s immediately in front of me, and I paint it first. Then I paint the world around that.
That’s interesting because that’s the opposite process of watercolor, right? But you’re working in acrylics, so you can do that.
Watercolor led me there, because I used paint for many years in wash, which is opaque watercolor — you paint the color that you lay on top of another. There’s a certain level of color pollution that goes on. You can use that to your advantage, or it can really wreck what you’re trying to do and I’m striving for a real clarity of color. My colors aren’t muddy — they’re pretty clear. When I was doing wash, it didn’t work for me to lay color on top of color, so I started with everything sort of being separated out.
When I moved to acrylic painting, I just carried on that same procedure, and [it’s unique] because of the color quality and quality of brush stroke. It also causes me to think about all those spaces in between the branches as shapes. I’m painting each of those shapes as if they were a subject themselves. It’s sort of a geometric way of breaking down a scene. It’s “geometricizing” the negative space. I’m real red hot about the negative space and how to shape it. Often, it’s the most interesting thing about a picture.
If you’re drawing a tree and all these intersecting limbs, it ends up being a thousand triangles, which is fun. That’s something cubists taught us: to deconstruct things into their basic geometry.
Artist Elizabeth Bradford in her studio. Photographed by Peter Taylor in Charlotte, NC, November 19, 2024
Did anyone or anything influence your current style?
I spent an awful lot of time studying the impressionists and post-impressionists with deep interest. Early on, I was really fascinated by Georgia O’Keefe, who is a great pioneer of taking the natural world and rendering it abstract. Of course, I was especially fascinated by her because she’s a woman, and there weren’t many of them to look to as role models. So, she was a feminist touchstone.
Your work is vibrant and large-scale. How do you choose your palette for each painting, and how do you determine the size?
I like scale because it’s unusual in my life. Women are conditioned, particularly of my generation, to be quiet and not take up space. One of my avowed goals is to take up space. To speak through the work with some boldness.
The palette … sometimes in nature I see things trend toward a color, so I just use that color. So, a gray that trends toward violet, I just use violet. I push things to extremes of what I perceive. And I like really pure hues. I like the clarity of color. I think that comes out of exposure to pop art and 20th- and 21st-century life.
How did you choose the paintings for this exhibit?
The paintings in this exhibit are the most recent things I’ve done. And it just happened to be a difficult time for me, so the work has some edges to it that are speaking about that. I didn’t realize it at the time I was doing them but now, in retrospect, I realize I was channeling those anxieties and those triumphs.
What do you hope that this exhibit at Davidson College, essentially in your backyard, will achieve that others may have not?
It is different for me, showing at Davidson, because this town and this school have supported me as an artist since I was in my 20s. People all over this town own my early work. They’ve just shown up, time after time, for the many exhibitions I’ve had in the area. Davidson has played a large role in my life just because it educates everybody in its sphere. I’ve always benefited from its intellectual generosity.
My hope for this show is that on a cold February night, it brings a sense of joy, community and hopefulness. I always hope that my work inspires people to look at the natural world with greater reverence.
Warp Weft Water Weeds is on view at the Van Every/Smith Galleries at Davidson College from Feb. 13-April 9. An opening reception will be held Feb. 13 from 5:30-7:30 p.m.
all available work by each elizabeth bradford can be viewed on our website under her individual tab including sizing + pricing. hidell brooks gallery is by appointment. please call the gallery if you have any further questions.