|art of the state
Super-natural
Pamlico Sound Bank
DAVIDSON ARTIST ELIZABETH BRADFORD CELEBRATES THE BEAUTY OF THE WILD.
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n a former cotton shed in Mecklenburg County, Elizabeth Bradford paints the natural world around her. With extraordinary, saturated colors and meticulous, zoomed-in 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 64
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SOUTHPARK
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 plans a solo exhibition of her work. Wilmington’s Cameron Art Museum 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 in Charlotte, the Weatherspoon Art Museum at UNC Greensboro and Blowing Rock Art and History Museum, as well as in many
ART COURTESY ELIZABETH BRADFORD
by Liza Roberts
