Exhibitions
Stephen Bradley - Sub
22 November - 3 December, 2011
In 1993 I decided to make a painting with as little thought attached to the process as possible.
In the first month the composition included a vague landscape upon which sat a triangular configuration of snakes. In the second month the snakes disappeared below the surface of the paint, I abandoned the work and it sat at the end of the converted attic I was using as a studio.
At the same time, in the same room, I was transcribing a stream of consciousness piece I’d visualised a couple of years earlier, a work I later self-published as The Journey of the Flower Man. The method for making the Flower Man had been that I would wait for something to appear in my mind and write down what I was seeing as it unfolded: I'd capture the scene and then forget it. In the end there were seventy-five chapters.
One afternoon I was transcribing Chapter Twenty-Five and came across: ‘As soon as he’d drunk the goat’s milk, the sky became bright pink and the road became a tangled mass of snakes.’ It was with some surprise that I looked at the painting at the other end of the room. In the preceding few days I had reworked it entirely: I had transformed the sky into an abstraction of pink, and stripped back the lower part of the canvas, exhuming the snakes. I had illustrated something of which I had no memory.
It was then that I realised the validity of this method. I have worked this way ever since.
In the works made post-2000, I have evolved this method further by using found, used canvases. After blanking them out with an opaque wash, I then approach the process in the normal way: working thoughtlessly, creating and destroying, and allowing the original painting that lies buried beneath to inform the piece either by composition, contour of brushstroke, or by the actual paint itself.
It has struck me that many of the most interesting and important marks in these last paintings were not made by me.
Stephen Bradley 2011