Every artwork, to varying degrees, is an abstraction—the concentrated essence of a larger whole. What has been observed is distilled, transformed in its rendering, things seen, unseen, sensed, from the ground beneath our feet to the universe beyond. Every artwork is an abstraction? Not necessarily a statement to be made in the presence of Peter Bradley, even with the qualifier “to varying degrees.” His belief in abstract art—Abstract with a capital A—is unwavering. Art for him is a mind/body engagement, a daily practice. Abstract painting is his field, color is his field, and he has been at it for a long time now. Exhibiting since the late 1960s, Bradley was associated early on with Color Field painting, which was then, where critics and museum curators were concerned, the domain of the painters Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Mark Rothko before them, with his somberly veiled, floating forms. In recent years, the field, as a site ventured into, trespassed one might say, beyond the limits of its established art historical boundaries, expanded, and no less chromatically—a story revised “better late than never”—with the reappraisal of artists such as Frank Bowling, Ed Clark, Sam Gilliam, Suzanne Jackson, Joe Overstreet, Alma Thomas, Stanley Whitney, Jack Whitten, and the subject of the present essay, Peter Bradley. Proceeding across the metaphorical field, venturing further back in time, we encounter, unexpectedly, the Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, whose pursuit of movement and color over faithful rendering, his favoring of natural light, proved influential for the Impressionists, the nineteenth-century painters who may be considered the earliest Color Field practitioners. One proclamation of Delacroix’s with which Bradley would surely be in agreement, with his understanding of improvisation in music, and which is evident in his own art over six decades: “Draftsmen may be made, but colorists are born.” Some things, maybe those most essential, cannot be taught.

In raising the notion that every artwork is an abstraction, the premise is worth countering dialectically: Is every artwork representational? Potentially another minefield where this resolute artist is concerned, or not? He would, after all, acknowledge that every painting is a representation of space, whether a canvas is measured in inches or feet. From a Persian miniature, imagery on a microscopic scale, to Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19), with its cinematic expanse, all art is life-size, from life and from history. How can it not be? All art is a meeting point, ideally, between the eyes and the mind of the artist and those of the viewer. This is an inhabitable space, only measurable by degrees. Artists have their hand in it, with both proximity and distance. Freed from the easel and the brush, artists of Bradley’s generation, as he himself, went big in their ambition, and if not necessarily in scale then with an expansive attitude toward paint and how it would come to be applied to or absorbed into canvas. Paint would be poured and sprayed, the canvas stained, sponges employed to spread as well as remove paint. In even the most wholly non-relational works, we encounter the act of painting as visibly represented. If art was representational in these respects, as artists themselves sought greater freedom, tuning in and turning on, particularly in the age of space exploration, head-space would inevitably be part of the equation—as far as the eye could see. Until the 1950s, a painter held a brush in hand, relatively close to the surface of the canvas, even Jackson Pollock, although his was wielded more freely, fluidly, paint flung from bristled ends rather than smoothly brushed, a form of conjuring, a matter of the hand being quicker than the eye: action painting, so-called, defying genre, the act made visible within an energy field. Long after the artist is gone, their presence still felt. (The same cannot always be said of representation, perhaps only forensically.)1 Pollock had been born in 1912; Futurism in 1909. The Futurist painters, who aimed to capture a world increasingly motorized, propelled forward by the speed of life in all its kinetic chaos, continued to produce works primarily within the normative scale of small to medium-size canvases, their paintings, upon completion and exhibited, held within frames, often gilded and ornate—dynamic images contained. Although this would seem to parallel that definition of abstraction initially stated, the concentrated essence of a larger whole, the future had not yet arrived. These artists represented the present before them, the world as it was in that moment. One of the few Futurist paintings that today remains wholly transcendent, luminously so, is Giacomo Balla’s Lampada ad arco (1910–11), due to its subject, a city streetlight, but primarily by way of the artist’s phenomenological rendering of it, by means of radial light and radiant color, as if the painting itself was plugged into live current, even now, over a hundred years on. Were it not for the recognizable structure of the lamppost at its center and a crescent moon in the top right corner, the image would hover before us as pure, glowing abstraction, less a representation than an apparition. Here, another unexpected visitor appears, possibly from another world, not our own—the past registers as distant planet—the Afrofuturist composer, bandleader, and visionary, Sun Ra, who claimed to have come from Saturn, accompanied by his Arkestra, with his anthemic “Space Is the Place,” recorded in 1972, three years after humans set foot on the moon, although he had been “traveling the spaceways” since 1952 at least.2 Sun Ra represented the world as it could be. As he concludes in the 1980 version of his poem “The Image Reach”:

“Take these, as you have taken all else from me, For I now stand upon the threshold of other worlds And WINGS have grown upon my mind to take me beyond the Gravity and gravitation of the Earth …”3

The abstraction/representation polarity turns on art’s subject, particularly if it seems to have none, or one not traditionally pictorial. But is a painting a representation only when its subject can be readily identified? What about: red and blue nearly squarish rectangles with a narrow, vertical blue band in between, measuring nine feet wide? This accurately if dryly describes Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV (1969/70), from which it can be imagined easily enough, with the admission that mental images from even the simplest parameters will not cor- respond from one person to another. Or what about: three yellow/green pear-shaped forms, each with a bent brown stem? This might be Three Pears (1878/79), by Paul Cézanne. Although the objects appear realistic enough, were they? Not widely known is the fact that the artist, who frequently took longer to complete a picture than an apple or a pear would retain its ripe coloration, relied at times on artificial fruit. Some still life subjects, apparently or not, are more still than others. But it needn’t matter. One painting wants you to believe three pears were present; the other doesn’t necessarily want you to believe anything. What else would a vertical band be? And what’s to be feared? The visible subject of a painting may be no more than a pretext to paint. Of this, with his daily painting practice, Peter Bradley is well aware. Seeing itself is a subject, and every painting leads to the next, connected to those that came before, those that follow, each being autonomous while together comprising a larger world.

Landscape as Mindscape, or Mind-escape

Highly attuned to perception and temporality, to his own consciousness, Cézanne may be thought of as the unseen subject of his paintings, and not excluding the portraits he painted. Someone posed before him, but he stood before himself, first and foremost, and so did Newman, and so does Bradley. Here, Delacroix speaks to us from some hundred years before the Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s, as they poured themselves into painting, emotionally or at an intellectual remove, whose body-operating and break with tradition, and the challenge this posed, led to the Color Field painters in the decade that followed. “Everything,” proclaimed Delacroix, “is a subject; the subject is yourself. It is within yourself … to reveal it to others, to study one-self, to paint oneself continually in [one’s] work.” The artist-as subject, in terms of representation, results in self-portrait, a human still life. The artist-as-subject, with regard to abstraction, specifically gestural or process-oriented works, presents us with the evidence that something has taken place, that someone was there and left behind traces of the routes and detours taken. This is true even when, or especially when, we can’t be sure of how on earth it materialized. There is mystery and factuality, which are in no way mutually exclusive. Abstraction, as Bradley himself has acknowledged, comes from the here and now—“the colors and shapes of the paintings… are seen in our daily lives.”4 The here and now may be more elusive than we think. Bradley’s subject is painting itself, and his ongoing engagement with it. Within painting as an activity, his subject is color, how it performs, he himself its conductor. With this term we think of someone leading an orchestra, or overseeing the passengers on a train, or a body that transmits light, electricity, and heat, all associations we can relate to art and music, to performers and audience. Another subject for art we refer to as abstract: its reception. The viewer, it’s been said, completes the work.5 Trains of thought can be trains to ride.

Bradley’s paintings, presented to us frontally on gallery and museum walls, from which we choose our distance, to go forward and recede, alternately inward and outward, also suggest a microscopic and a telescopic vantage, orientations downward and upward, near and far. Hemming, from 1971, has been described as having cloud-like forms on “a dark bluish field flecked with touches of white, pink, peach and teal …”6 With its buoyant atmospherics imagined by way of that telescopic view, in the gallery-as-observatory, the painting elicits a simple, satisfying two-word descriptor: space dust. This is looking, one might say, on a particulate level, what Jack Whitten has referred to as “the molecular dimensions of inner space.”7 The language-based Conceptual art in this period, rather than present an image, at times suggested the indefinable, ephemerality, elusiveness in terms of the cosmic as well as the everyday: “It is not tangible … It cannot be held onto … Some of it that is known cannot be described … Speculation about it is unreliable … Its limits can’t be fixed … The circumstances around it are always changing… It can remembered … It can be forgotten.” So wrote/proposed Robert Barry in 1970.8 Bradley presents us, with Hemming and across a half century of painting, with images of the intangible, material evocations of the nearly immaterial. Comprised of rock, ice, and minerals, even space dust, one of the keys to life on Earth, has physical reality, and it is also the stuff of which we, carbon-based life-forms, are made. Thirty years later, Bradley painted Eulampis (2021), named after the purple-throated hummingbird native to the Caribbean. By comparing the painting with a photograph of the bird, we grasp something intrinsic to abstraction, that it has no obligation to anything but its own truth, as that more phe- nomenal works prove elusive for the camera. We acknowledge well that this small creature’s origins were likely very far from its natural habitat, emerging as all life from the Big Bang out of which the universe evolved, messier, less composed. In this there is something decidedly explosive to Eulampis, as to many of Bradley’s paintings, the result of his process of applying paint to canvas, whether in 1971 by means of an airless spray gun, or today, when he may wield the drill he uses to mix paint. He aims it toward the surface as it continues to rotate, paint projecting omni-directionally with great force and speed, accompanied by the whirring sound of its motor. This is an artist who also, it’s important to note, moves at a more measured and considered pace in the act of painting, as when he uses long bamboo poles to manipulate and disperse color, wet on wet. His surface may at times be “rained upon,” as when Bradley takes a garden hose and sprays it liberally, giving the paint more fluidity, allowing it to mix and slide, to move on its own almost beyond his control, the artist’s hand at an intentional remove. Chance is one of his tools. In this we are reminded of the “pour paintings” of John Armleder and Pat Steir, as well as those of Larry Poons before them. Poons’s “elephant skin” paintings of 1969 were made on the floor, but in the early ’70s he would tack unstretched canvas to the wall. Having a vertical orientation, as the stretched canvases of Armleder and Steir had in process, gravity is the artist’s “assistant,” and although abstract these works are relatable to nature. Steir’s paintings, made since 1990, the image descending from the top down, are referred to as waterfalls.

Bradley’s canvas, in contrast, is placed flat, raised slightly off the ground, allowing him to circumnavigate the painting, to keep it in play as he proceeds, and so the final orientation for viewers may prove pleasurably disorienting. When the edges of a canvas are not adhered to, the space beyond all four sides is potentially charged. Viewers may imagine the painting, even once definitively oriented and hung on the wall, to continue further—north, south, east, and west. Although Hemming measures 108 by 84 inches, in truth, or rather in the abstract truth, as an experience, it may appear proportionally larger. Does it end where the canvas has been folded around the edge of the stretcher and pinched at its corners, or does it continue well beyond if considered long enough? While the making of a painting is durational, the object before us appears as a fact (which it is), something complete. But not so fast. Looking at art is also durational, and not to be hurried: much depends on the viewer, perhaps art’s greatest variable. Here is the figurative element in all art, whatever form it takes, whether abstract, representational, or has any visual or physical manifestation: whoever stands before the work of art. Viewers can’t help but place themselves in relation to what they see, the lower part of a painting, especially if close to where the wall meets the floor on which they stand, as a ground, its midpoint, particularly if there seems to be any sort of dividing line and the space above is open, as a horizon. A painting need not have horizontal orientation, greens, and earth tones to evoke landscape. One of Bradley’s finest paintings in recent years, Coravilas (2021), at nearly eleven feet tall, might be considered a Chinese mountainscape as joyous lyrical abstraction. Abstract painting may be thought to present us with an event horizon—as per NASA, “the speed limit of the cosmos”—the picture plane having greater fluidity. And yet to view some of Bradley’s paintings as landscapes is not uncommon, with those more encrusted in surface incident appearing to be moonscapes. Describing the lunar surface as comprised of dry lake beds, ridged craters, ossified lava flows, volcanic structures, and ejecta—ejecta especially—begins to catalog some of Bradley’s more visceral “terrain.” Back on Earth, the material description of So What (2020), borrowing a title from the opening track on Miles Davis’s landmark 1959 release, Kind of Blue, is listed as acrylic, pumice, dirt, and leaves on canvas. Pumice is a light, porous volcanic rock which forms after lava, as a gaseous froth, has quickly solidified, and like paint is liquid at its moment of release. Other recent paintings incorporate natural and atomized elements: sand, glass, and mica. An untitled painting from 2000, dominated by two large metallic silver orbs—planets on a collision course?—one cerulean cold, the other tinged pale purple, is sci-fi otherworldly. Twenty years later, Kind of Icy Blue.

The Circle of Fifths9

All this and more came to mind after repeated visits to Peter Bradley’s exhibition at Karma last fall, thoughts amplified when walking outside his house in the country. It was a mid-November afternoon upstate, clouds parting to sun a day after rain, puddles here and there, the ground soft underfoot. A slight sloping hill led to a long, narrow shipping container that has served as the artist’s studio, the grass strewn with brittle leaves and cracked nuts, hollowed, chocolate brown, dropped from hickory trees. Just above the crest of the hill a tall, wide strand of slender bamboo contrasted with an outcrop of stone, the same from which the house had been built in the 1700s. At the far end of the property green-gray woods and bared thicket, a glimpse of coming winter, the crisp air mixed with moist earth and the pleasant smokiness of logs burning in a fireplace nearby. The scene was evocative of the sort of bucolic landscape we are familiar with from atop a calendar page. The paintings made there, however, are decidedly abstract, while at the same time rooted in this particular place. How could they not be? Bradley is simultaneously focused on what is happening on the canvas and aware of his surroundings: the sound of birds, the temperature. He works year-round and in all weather. He does not paint pictures; he makes paintings. From the ground up. Oddly enough, in working outside, or partially, one end of the container swung open for air and light, working in relation to nature (the artist is also a gardener), Bradley qualifies as a post-studio artist—as does Cézanne. The term came to prominence in the late ’60s/early ’70s, when a questioning of the art object and a desire to be out in the world sent artists beyond the white walls and artificial light of studios and galleries, to be free of enclosed space and all it entailed. A period rife with experimentation—from earth-works and ephemeral installations in nature, to conceptual art that took no physical form, to choreographers staging dances on rooftops and fire escapes—did not, or so the story once went, include painting. Painting stood for Art with a capital A, and with all its history and baggage it would be rejected, declared dead and done with. This was possibly meant as the coup de grâce to its earliest dismissal, that photography had made painting obsolete. What we understand now is that photography may have made representational painting obsolete, or if not obsolete then redundant, a thing of the past. In this there is the desire for what is new—for novelty is hard to resist—no less something that would eventually prove more democratic: the camera. Today, both for better and for worse, anyone with a phone can take a photograph. The same cannot be said of painting. And so photography made painting entirely vital all over again, and when transcendent elevated it to a higher plane of human observation, that of the artist’s and that of the audience. Our assertion, yet to be proven otherwise: photography has not made abstract painting obsolete.

Experimentation in the ’70s did include painting, freed from the easel and the wall, from stretcher bars and free, so crucially for Bradley as we have said, from the paintbrush itself. In old-fashioned painting we saw the hand of the artist disembodied, from the wrist down. Time would have to pass before we would grasp that painting in the hands and minds of artists who remained in its sphere was also a form of questioning, particularly when doubt was cast upon the practice as it had been. What was true for sculptors, and those engaged with moving images—photographers, filmmakers, and choreographers as well—along with poets and composers, was also true for painters, those more restless: a desire for a freer relation to their art, needing distance on what had come before. In this, painting is both aware of and at odds with its history, which sets it apart from most if not all other visual and object-oriented art. Any number of painters in this period left behind the tool requiring proximity to a surface, the paintbrush, denying a less controlled hand and welcoming chance, another notion of fidelity, one not in the service of a final image but open to the unknown, exploring other ways of applying paint, or eliminating the canvas itself—the expansive sculptural pours of Lynda Benglis, prominently. This break was not only performative, aligning it with music and dance, but emancipatory. For some, it was inevitable.

Delacroix’s assertion that “Draftsmen may be made, but colorists are born” is a potent reminder that there is schooling and there is intuition, technique and feel, rehearsal and improvisation, and improvisation is no matter of “making it up as you go along.” You had to have been there before to take those detours, those flights, to stretch out and find your way back. The improvisatory aspect of painting parallels that of music, specifically jazz, which is what Bradley listens to almost exclusively. Of the space between painting and the sonic realm, he has remarked, unsurprisingly, “I feel like I am composing music.”10 There is a serious, high-end speaker at the back of Bradley’s container-studio, a vintage Klipschorn, a long wire run out from the house so that he can have music on when he’s working. There is a soundtrack to his life as well as to his art. Painting as soundscape. Although he only has one speaker, the other went missing some time ago, the sound is positively booming, the container itself another amplifier. The audio may be “mono,” but the greater stereo effect is the entwining of his visual intellect and his musical mind. The improvisatory nature of abstract and process-based art relates to all the composers and players with whom he finds affinity, referring to them in numerous painting titles: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Dizzy Gillespie, Milt Jackson, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Sun Ra. Bradley’s painting Sun Ra (2021), a celestial nocturne in which a hazy yellow orb, encrusted with bits of glass (had he used Mars Yellow here?) glows within an expanse of violet sky flecked with vermillion ejecta, its source an ovoid planet to the right, seemingly in the midst of a seismic, catastrophic event. To the left are graceful, creamy lavender drifts about to wisp into this debris field in space: the calm before and during the storm. In this description, nocturne refers both to visual art, the term originally from Whistler, to a scene evocative of nighttime, and to music, to a composition inspired by the nocturnal world. The painting corresponds beautifully with the sensibility of the man to whom it has been dedicated, who also navigated between lyricism and crescendos. We can imagine it as the hand-painted cover to one of his albums, perhaps no more appropriately than to a recording made with his Intergalactic Infinity Arkestra, The Night of the Purple Moon (1970). One of its standout tracks points to a vantage we can associate with any number of paintings of Bradley’s: “A Bird’s-Eye View of Man’s World.” Eulampis, particularly in a time when nature is under greater threat than ever before, comes readily to mind. The painting titled My Favorite Things (2020) refers, rather than to the song composed by Richard Rodgers for The Sound of Music, to the well-known interpretation by John Coltrane, appearing on his album of the same name, recorded in the fall of 1960. The song had become an instant standard only the year prior, at the heart of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, sung by Mary Martin, and in under three minutes’ time. Coltrane’s version, at fourteen minutes, expanded freely upon its recognizable tune. Performed live, it could go on considerably longer. There is a 1966 recording from Tokyo, released as John Coltrane, Live in Japan, where he is accompanied by his wife Alice on piano, Rashied Ali on drums, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Pharoah Sanders on saxophone and percussion, where it was played for an astounding fifty-seven minutes, nearly an hour’s journey. When we consider Bradley’s painting dedicated to Coltrane as a sonic landscape, and not only in terms of stretching out in time but of exploring the dynamics of volume and tone, color, shading, hitting minor chords, improvising on the major, reverberations and echoes—its visual-acoustic properties—we find confluence between these artists; for Coltrane in his solo, what he called the free part, his “wanting to hear something different on it,”11 and for Bradley in his wanting to see something different as he moves from one canvas to the next. As with Coltrane’s many versions of “My Favorite Things,” and it was a favorite, performed throughout his career, Bradley’s paintings are all related, part of a continuum. He might say, simply enough, that the story of his painting is that it goes on. Back in the house, watched over by a huge, bone-white elephant skull in the corner, a reminder of his time in South Africa, listening to an extended composition, noting its steady forward motion, Bradley remarked, “The train doesn’t stop.” Of course what was playing was a record by John Coltrane, and what Bradley meant, hinting slyly, was that “The ’trane doesn’t stop.” He was referring to the musician, to himself, and to what they have both done: used their art as a vehicle to take them, and us, further.

1. The allusion here is to what can be discovered beneath the surface of a painting when it is subject to x-ray technology and infra-red thermography, by which an artist’s initial outlines and, at times completely altered composition, may be revealed. The detective work of conservators and art historians.
2. Sun Ra, born Herman Poole Blount, in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1914, known as Sonny as a child, would legally change his name in the fall of 1952, to Le Sony’r Ra, distancing himself from the past, and what for him was a slave name, while reaching further back to Egypt and its kings, embracing the future, his self-invented identity, determining his own destiny. In naming his band the Arkestra, he envisioned an orchestra as a vehicle for exploration and, with its biblical reference, for salvation.
3. Sun Ra, The Immeasurable Equation: The Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. James L. Wolf and Hartmut Geerken (Wartaweil: Waitawhile, 2005), 205.
4. Peter Bradley, quoted in “The Deluxe Show: Art Goes to the People,” Southwest Art Gallery Magazine, September 1971, 14, repr. in Darby English, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 230.
5. Marcel Duchamp, in his lecture “The Creative Act,” presented at the Convention of the American Federation of Arts, Houston, Texas, April 1957, asserts: “All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives its final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists.” See Gregory Battcock, ed., The New Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966), 48.
6. This is Darby English’s description of Bradley’s 1971 painting Hemming, in 1971: A Year in the Life of Color, 210.
7. Jack Whitten, “Artist’s Statement,” October 2005, in Katy Siegel, ed., High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–1975 (New York: Independent Curators International/D.A.P., 2006), 101.
8. These are excerpts from the Conceptual artist Robert Barry’s book-length piece Robert Barry, 1970 (Turin: Sperone Editore, 1970).
9. Circle of Fifths is the title of a 1973 painting by Bradley, referring to the arrangement of the twelve notes of the musical alphabet in a circle.
10. Katya Kazakina, “Is Peter Bradley Ready for Round 2 in the Limelight?,” New York Times, August 19, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/19/arts/design/bradley-artist-karma-houston.html.
11. “An Interview with John Coltrane, May 2, 1961,” in Conversations in Jazz: The Ralph J. Gleason Interviews, ed. Toby Gleason (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020).