Lot 10
Bradford Johnson (American, b. 1950s to 1960s). "Auto Arborescent (blue)" acrylic on panel, 2003. Labels with artist name, title, year, size, and medium on verso. A fascinating abstract painting by American artist Bradford Johnson titled "Auto Arborescent (blue)" depicting the silhouette of a pine tree, perhaps a blue spruce, in shades of navy, glaucous, midnight, cornflower, and powder blue. Resembling a shadow on the snowy ground or a hazy figure in the far distance, the composition is rendered in an out-of-focus manner with broad strokes that fade as they move outward, the tree, or tree-like design, gently slanted with proportions morphed in a dream-like fashion, all obscured by hundreds of petite lacerations throughout adding to the mystifying nature of the image. The title possibly meaning "self resembling a tree," this perplexing painting is set in a custom frame with a suspension wire on verso for easy display! Size of painting: 6" W x 8" H (15.2 cm x 20.3 cm); of frame: 7.5" W x 9.5" H (19 cm x 24.1 cm)
Review of a Bradford Johnson exhibition in September 2015 by Bruce Herman: "Bradford Johnson has been painting now for nearly three decades and has exhibited extensively in both solo and group exhibitions - garnering acknowledgments and awards from such prestigious organizations as the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and MacDowell Artist Colony. Throughout this time he has focused in an unembarrassed way on major religious and humanistic themes - often called 'first-level' questions: who are we, where do we come from, why are we here, what has gone wrong, where are we going? Artists and philosophers have been asking these things since the beginning of human community - and more recently have posed even more poignant queries: why are we perpetually at war, why is there such suffering if there is a good God? Why?
In Johnson's work, there seems always to be an element of immanent danger and potential or actual disaster. Images of wrecked zeppelins, ships, airplanes, and balloons alongside ordinary human activities; indicators of aspiration and failure, calamity and hope - and all of Johnson's paintings seem overlaid with time and memory. His work participates directly and indirectly in the vanitas tradition - in which images point toward our finitude, our mortality, and the vanity of overweening human ambitions. Yet Johnson's paintings are never preachy - never didactic. Always allusive and multi-layered, they are open to multiple interpretations.
In the current exhibition, there is plenty of the above: disaster, tragedy, radical contingency, and a sustained meditation on the fragility and brevity of life, particularly as it is lived out for others: in the example of Nate Saint, Jim Elliot, and Edward McCully - revered members of the Wheaton community as missionaries who were considered martyrs for the Christian faith. But there is also a surprise element we've never seen before in this artist's oeuvre: images of popular culture, commercial brands, poster art, and movie stills, oddments of the entertainment industry and ephemera of a particular time period. All from the years surrounding the killing of Elliot, Saint, et al. by the Auca (known as the Huaorani). The potentially jarring juxtaposition of home-movie footage stills, personal photos, grainy news images, and pop-culture signs - all of this jumbled together gives the viewer an unexpected sense of timelessness in the midst of very particular time-bound moments. It is as though we become strangers to our own lives as we see time and eternity mix and separate.
Without a single religious platitude and without resorting to propaganda of any sort, the artist moves us into a receptive space - ready to see how God's work is accomplished in the silences, in the caesuras, in the seemingly meaningless gaps between clear narrative and random image. We see an entire era through a haze of pictures and yet gain insight into a particular life through the artist's sure touch - seeing finally that the drama of a martyr's tale is most honestly glimpsed in the flux of ordinary time: God with us in the humdrum and workaday. And alongside those we think to call martyrs or fools, we become saints and strangers in the unfolding tableaux - working out our salvation with fear and trembling in the passing moments." (source: artist's website)
Provenance: private New York, New York, USA collection
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#191209
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Condition:
- Labels with artist name, title, year, size, and medium on verso. Some possible scratches, though they may be part of the artist's process, but otherwise, intact and very nice. Set in custom frame with suspension wire on verso for display.
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