SASCHA BEHRENDT:  Can you share some of your early experiences of turning on expectations to start a new life as an artist?  

KATHERINE BRADFORD: In 1968 I married Peter Bradford, who was exactly the person I wanted and was expected to marry. Our families had known each other already so there was much celebrating over it. He had just graduated from law school and proposed that we move to Maine for a year so he could be an aide to the young, Democrat governor there, Ken Curtis. I was working at the Harlem Welfare Center in New York City and agreed to this plan thinking it might be like going into the Peace Corps. We rented a house on the coast and fell in love with all of Maine life. Like many of our friends we bought an old farmhouse, planted an organic garden, and installed a wood stove. I gave birth to boy-girl twins the next year and Peter and his law school friends found a big welcome into positions of power in Maine state government. The 70s in Maine were an exciting time with hundreds of young people fleeing the cities in what was termed the “back to the land” movement. I got to know artists, poets, dancers, and writers who were living what one might call a hippie lifestyle and I realized for the first time what being an artist was about. I saw that it involved a whole different way of living your life, an entire outlook, and a set of priorities with long hours in the studio making art. BAM! I knew that this was what I wanted. Not just to make art, but to live wholly as an artist. 

No one in my family, my children, my husband, and especially my parents, could see me in this role. My mother and father were totally against me taking on anything other than being a supportive wife and mother. To them, artists were hard-drinking weirdos with unstable marriages and no hope of making a decent living. My only recourse was to be mostly in the closet about my intense yearning to make art and to be part of that world. After all, I’d already signed up to be the wife of an important political figure and the mother of twins. I felt terribly guilty that I had started out as one kind of partner and had changed into someone my husband didn’t recognize. I think all this is the basis for me once saying that it was much easier for me to come out as a queer person than to come out as an artist.   

How did your representation with the much respected New York gallery Canada come about?  

One of my students, Brendan Cass, told me about Canada. He felt there was a group of young, experimental artists forming a community around the gallery and invited me to one of their events. I saw first-hand that these painters were putting the paint on loosely and sometimes hardly at all. Joe Bradley’s show of Schmagoo paintings on raw canvas completely intrigued me and Katherine Bernhardt made an entire installation in the gallery inspired by her stay in Morocco and her love of their rugs. Brian Belott’s debut work at Canada consisted of answering machines playing messages as well as very sassy paintings that he’d let his friends collaborate on. For many years I attended the Canada openings and got to know the four partners who had established the gallery. Even though I didn’t have much of a big reputation, Sarah Braman, one of the founders, asked in 2015 if she could come to my studio. I really wanted to belong to Canada, so for this great opportunity, I thought I’d better make a better body of work.

That summer I moved my studio from my barn in Maine into a Mill building in the center of town, where luckily the proportions of my new summer studio were large, with high ceilings similar to Canadas. When fall came, and the whole team from the gallery showed up for a studio visit in Brooklyn, my heart was beating very fast. They told me their schedule was full, but perhaps there was room in January. I threw myself into making the best paintings I could immediately. Sarah Braman astounded me by liking my most economically painted, almost unfinished, work. She has a very good eye, and by editing from what she saw, I learned to trust instincts that I didn’t even know I had. A lot of people showed up for my first January exhibition with them. I think they wanted to cheer me on – after all, here I was in my 70’s starting to exhibit at a gallery with a very wild and crazy reputation. After the show ended, Phil Grauer, another Canada partner, came over to my studio and despite successfully selling out the show very sternly said to me “You know Bradford if you sell your work it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s good.” He pointed to one of the paintings I was working on “We could never show that piece in the gallery.”  Right before my eyes that painting shriveled up and disappeared like the bad witch’s shoes in The Wizard of Oz. I began to realize I had to take more risks and do bolder paintings. Since then both Phil and Sarah Braman have continued to give me unfettered critiques and advice, which has, for the most part, been “gold.”

You have described an artist's job as “redefining one's heroes.” Who were yours? 

The artists that interested me most were mark makers like Joan Snyder in the ’70s or masters who’d invented their own way of painting people like Philip Guston and Henri Matisse. I also admire the contemporary artists Christina De Miguel, Todd Bienvenu, Wells Chandler, Grace Metzler, Raya Terran, Meghan Brady, and Robert Nava. Chris Martin and I have been close friends for many years, and I value all our time spent together with ongoing conversations about painting and life.

During the Covid pandemic, many artists produced works focused on plants and flowers as a form of relief. You at this time created many paintings showing figures in tender relationships of care to each other. Is this theme still influencing your work?

Once I gained the confidence to include full-blown figures in my work I realized that hands and feet could be crucial to nailing down their body language. I’ve left out the facial features most of the time because visually that seemed like too much information. My last show at Canada in April 2021 had people calmly holding each other and putting their hands (and sometimes feet) out there to comfort someone near them. Viewers saw a lot of pandemic solace in the work but also a moment to revive our sense of belonging to each other through touch and tenderness.

What is coming up next for you?

In February I am having a solo show in Tokyo, Japan, at Tomio Koyama Gallery. It will be a show of swimmers in American bathing suits mostly swimming at night by moonlight. 

In June of this year, I am opening a big survey show at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine which will include paintings I’ve done since 1999. The show will travel to other museums in the USA and will include a beautiful catalog published by Rizzoli with essays by Nancy Princenthal and the curator, Jaime DeSimone. And this coming fall I will have a two-person show in LA with Sedrick Chisom at Matthew Brown Gallery, which I am very excited about.