MEL GOODING on JIM BRADFORD

for the Collins & Hastie Gallery

September, 2003

If Jim Bradford is that rarest of creatures, a fine and accomplished artist who is virtually unknown, it is because his native gift has been for much of his life suppressed or under-employed whilst, as one of the finest frame gilders of his time, he has exercised professionally another side of his nature, the craftsman’s love of precision and exactitude, a rigorous perfectionism that has more than a touch of the ethical about it. Among the artists who have been the beneficiaries of that skilful and dedicated attention have been Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland and Ceri Richards, and, as an adept, Bradford himself benefited from the inevitable intimacy with their painting, and that of the greatest School of Paris artists, that was a constant aspect of his professional work.

A special quality of attention, indeed, characterises everything that Bradford does. It may be said that over many years his creativity has found expression in a passion, fierce as any love, for the art of others. To be with Bradford when he looks at a painting by Picasso or Matisse, or a drawing by Cézanne or Giacometti, or handles a tiny Cycladic figure, or looks at a great building, is to be witness to the way art can enter the spirit when the mind and the heart are as one, critically open and generous, creatively alive and constructive. He looks at art as an artist, observing, for example, how the rhythm of an underlying design in a painting animates a still life arrangement, or how the repetition of brush strokes enacts a natural movement in a landscape, or how a particular colour, at first so surprising, is exactly right for its expressive purpose. As he looks and speaks his hands move as if in sympathy with his perception, enacting in gesture the structural coherence the eye and mind discern.

This imaginative empathy is not confined to the visual, for Bradford is enthralled by – in thrall to – the jazz music of Black America, especially to that of the great 1940s generation of Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Coleman Hawkins, Thelonius Monk and Charlie Rouse. And such attentive closeness and inwardness with that music over so many years cannot but have made the most profound impression upon a creative sensibility as attuned to nuance, rhythm, colour and structure as effortless and inexhaustible variations of colour and key, mood and feeling. And as with those brilliant musicians, this subtle intuitive virtuosity depends on consummate technique, an intimate mastery of the medium, and the courage to begin afresh with every new performance. It is as if he were encountering the subject – a jug, a dish, flowers, a bunch of fruit – for the first time, and perhaps the last time, in his life.

In the light of this it seems in no way surprising to me that Cézanne should have been for him the exemplary model in painting, as the artist par excellence who works always to recreate the structure of the subject out of multiple improvised strokes, who knows that every work is but another attempt to attain that elusive ‘realisation’, and who works again and again from the same motifs, each time making it new, each time ringing the changes of angle, pace, colour, tone: ‘Here on the bank of the river the motifs multiply, the same subject seen from a different angle often subject for study of the most powerful interest and so varied that I think I could occupy myself for months without changing place, by turning now more to the right, now more to the left.’ (And what better phrase than Cézanne’s famous ‘petites sensations’ to describe the multiple notes of a Parker or Hawkins solo, each building up to a thrilling, unprecedented architectonic of sound.

It is clear from drawings and paintings surviving from his student years, and even more so from the handful of paintings Bradford has made and kept over later years, that he was always remarkably gifted. As I write I look at a remarkable painting of a pink rose in a glass jar made over twenty years ago: the luminosity of the rose against a grey-black background, the glaucous green of its leaves, the dull reflectiveness of the glass, the absolute simplicity of the presentation and its self-declarative painterliness make me think of Manet. It is more than an exercise in a particular style, it is a perfectly achieved realisation; it is a beautiful painting but its style is a given. I think also of a number of landscapes from over the years, each of which attests to his ability to assimilate and make his own something of the constructive improvisation of the troubled master of Aix. In other words, like all sophisticated artists Bradford paid close attention to his great predecessors and took what he needed from them.

But now with these glorious anarchic late paintings Bradford has come at last into this own. He gives full rein to a freedom of stylistic device that derives from this study of those who followed Cézanne, most notably the great Parisians, Picasso, Braque and Matisse. I invoke these names in particular simply to indicate the certain sources of the distinctive language that Bradford has developed. The components of that language – heightened colour, distortion of objects, flattened space, arbitrary abstraction, vibrant pattern – are recognisable, even familiar. What is original to his work, and intensely personal, is the paradoxical manner of their employment and combination: they combine a kind of turbulence, expressed in the quick agitation of surface stroke and descriptive arabesque, with an essentially decorative composition that unifies the entire surface of the canvas, top to bottom, side to side. ‘Composition,’ wrote Matisse, ‘is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the diverse elements at a painter’s command to express his feelings.’ Bradford’s familiar still life objects are caught up in strange and arbitrary configurations of colour, pattern, light and shadow. These are created by the textile fragments amongst which Bradford habitually sets them, and which are a means to the transforming of recessive space into indeterminate colour space, an autonomous space, purely pictorial. It is a device that allows for a marvellously insouciant freedom of manner and diversity of attack. Paint is deployed with animating gesturality here, a decorative flatness of application there, almost always in these recent paintings with an alla prima panache, fresh, direct, immediate. They exploit a virtuosic range of colour and tone, from radiant primaries – sky blues, fiery reds and intense yellows – to the most subtle tonalities of peach and green, ochre and grey. It is not verisimilitude that is sought so much as brilliant equivalents: a still life ensemble for a landscape, a bright star the sign for a flower. And their blacks! These more than any other colour in his repertoire are the sign of an expressive urgency that can transform a simple still life of a jug, a plate and a bunch of bananas into a vision of darkness and light.