CYNDRA BRADFORD   Portfolio | Artist Statement | Bio | Contact

I grew up under the easels of my parents, who were both artists. As a child I was very quiet and always looking at nature and drawing what I saw. It just seemed natural that I should become a painter, considering that one of the unspoken prerequisites to being an artist is sensitivity to one’s environment. An artist must have the ability to absorb his or her environment, feel it, and then, in turn – for me, as a landscape and equestrian painter – put it down on a blank canvas.

I paint primarily with oils and do so with a palette knife. I paint alla prima, which means “in one session” – regardless of the breadth of the piece, I do my best to finish it in one session because I like to capture the immediacy of the moment. Every painting has a mood to it, and that mood can be lost if a painter takes an inordinate amount of time to stop and analyze the piece to death. In my experience, most of the truth and artistry in painting lies in its inherent spontaneity. I just keep moving the colors back and forth and into each other until I get the colors that I want and until the paint has that kind of nice, juicy, thick quality to it. What I love about oils is that they keep their shape (they don’t flatten down like the acrylics) and they don’t dry too quickly – working back and forth induces subtle things to happen within the layers as one mixes onto and into them. Though I’ve made a habit of using the same palette knife throughout each painting, I make sure to always wipe it off between colors; doing this keeps the freshness to the paint.

I paint horses simply because I’ve always loved horses. When I was a child, my parents didn’t want to give me a horse right away; we lived in Big Sur, and horses were generally considered to be too fragile for that environment. By way of compromise, my parents bought me a donkey. In any event, I didn’t end up buying a horse until I was about twenty-four; I spent my twenties painting and galloping on the beach, which has inspired many of my paintings. What I find interesting in retrospect, coming back to painting, is that, for the longest time, I could draw horses but I couldn’t really render them in paint. It wasn’t until I started doing plein air paintings (French for “on location”) that I finally was able to start painting the horses. When painting horses, it’s easy to get caught up in the muscle structure though in reality painting horses is remarkably like painting a landscape: it involves planes and shapes and doesn’t require the painter to recreate every little muscle perfectly – I gave up on that because I’m not a realist painter. I much prefer an expressionist style of painting. For example, when painting horses I tend to make the legs longer than they realistically ought to be, or the horse may be painted in shades of blues, greens, and reds. As an artist, you need to focus on getting the concept right - the details will work themselves out in the process.

My art is essentially an attempt to communicate the beauty and the joy of nature through the use of color and form while opening people’s eyes and letting them put in what I haven’t – I want them to finish the painting with their own understanding. In other words, the excitement of the painting should always be there; the viewer should discover things just like I should be able to discover and rediscover them. My paintings have movement – throughout the canvas, I’m trying to create a life, a movement, rather than something that, just like photographs, is taken and done. It’s a wonderful feeling, noticing people seeing objects and themes in my paintings that I didn’t put there. I like to involve the viewer in the painting itself rather than having it all set. For my part, I thoroughly enjoy the process of painting – that’s what’s nice for me. And I hope that the viewer will appreciate and enjoy the final outcome!