The seed for the film With Peter Bradley was planted in 2019. During a reception at his gallery in the Hudson Valley town of Saugerties, New York, Robert Langdon introduced the artist Peter Bradley to Alex Rappoport, this film’s director. Although both the artist and the director had lived in the area for many years, just minutes apart, they had never met. The end result of this encounter, With Peter Bradley, gives us entry into Bradley's amazing life story and his innovative artistic process.

The film presents the artist in an intimate and inspirational form through Bradley’s clear, unscripted discussion and archival materials.  Aged just under 80 when the project started, Bradley tells us that he still feels young despite a shoulder replacement, having had both knees replaced and suffering a lung condition (COPD). We also learn that he paints every day despite not having had a solo exhibition since the 1970s, when he was represented by the prestigious André Emmerich Gallery in New York City.

Peter Bradley claims that it is the vitality of his creative process that keeps him young despite his age and the physical demands of his artmaking. At this point, the artist explains, he likes to make images he could not paint with a brush even if his life depended on it, and he is quite articulate in summarizing his desire to produce paintings that look as if the human hand is not involved. Instead, the gestural components come about through accidents, nature, and getting the colors to move about on their own. Painting daily in his shipping container studio and outside in nature, his process includes pouring paint from heavy cans onto large canvases, throwing paint with a stick, painting with the end of a rag, draping and rippling the canvases before adding color to them, or letting the rain drop onto an evolving work.

From Bradley’s words it is obvious that electronic possibilities are not a part of his conception of art. I imagine that, if asked, he would say that, despite wanting to remove the human hand from his artmaking, he relishes the hands-on quality of his process. He seems to enjoy the physicality and the way his modes of production allow him to bring some measure of intimacy into the product’s formulation. Perhaps his relationship to the physical side of artmaking offers a counterpoint worth considering when conceptualizing what art is today. I recently heard someone say that only electronic art is art now; yet, as Peter exemplifies, many of us still prefer to use earlier technologies in our studios.

Peter Bradley was born in 1940, and he grew up in Connellsville, Pennsylvania. His adopted mother, Edith Bradley, had no biological children. She encouraged him to paint every day, so his daily practice has long roots. His adopted father worked for the railroad as a waiter, and through his job met top line jazz musicians who would stay at the family’s boarding house. Miles Davis, Art Blakey, and Dizzy Gillespie were among the regulars. It was even rumored that his biological father was Miles Davis, which adds a tantalizing dimension to how his lifelong passion for jazz is inextricably interwoven into his creative process.

Indeed, Peter brings a musicality to his paintings through his use of color and improvisation. In terms of his cadence, jazz appears in two ways that work in tandem. First, it is clear that there is a certain measure of foundational structure to his process that is derived from his understanding of how to use his tools (or instruments) as he works with them. Simultaneously, the components--the notes or colors--manifest as an improvisation that is not designed. The result, therefore, is not something one could predict from the onset, but it is a visual jazz that lifts the spirit, opens one’s heart, and adds color to the mind. Javon Jackson’s score and the film’s excellent pacing capture and complement this in the film.

Jazz also relates to his production process in an unexpected way. When he talks enthusiastically about color and sound correlations, he explains that he perceives sound as color and translates his sensations onto canvas. Listening to his explanation of how sound and color are related led me to wonder if he is a synesthete, since he claims that every sound has a color, and different notes have different colors. Trumpets go to white or silver. Bass is always going to be blue, black, or tan. The artist himself does not define this in terms of jazz or synesthesia. Rather, as a painter, he explains that there are people who are portrait painters, people who paint objects, and people who just paint color. Bradley then says that those who just paint color, the category that he places himself in, are called abstract painters. In his view, they aren’t abstract at all because color is the most important thing.

I preferred the portions of the film that focused on him working and telling us about how his work. For example, after pulling a package from a storage area and finding an old print, Bradley steps back, remarks it isn’t bad, and notes that he still enjoys the way the black tonalities offer a stability to the dynamism of this detailed composition. In one section a white area overlaps a section of various grays that suggests a layering of the grays. Another part contains abundant crisscrossed markings that suggest aggression. When the camera moves in to highlight details, one can feel the depth within the engraving. Bradley adds that this was a singular print. Due to the complexity of the composition, he abandoned the idea of producing a longer series.

Cutting (or cropping) is another fascinating aspect of Bradley’s work. With text, editing is a form of cutting that enhances readability and ensures that the words communicate effectively. Similarly, film editing brings coherence through making changes that alter time, delineate sequences, and create pace. Bradley’s cutting of his large canvas paintings is a form of editing that makes his painting more powerful perceptually. The rationale behind it is that large canvases sometimes fail to congeal as a coherent composition, but parts will work superbly. By cropping, or cutting out the strong sections, the evocative and expressive interludes come more fully into focus. Keeping what works also serves a dual purpose. It gives him an opportunity to highlight the compelling parts and to recycle unresolved spaces. That which is recycled will become raw or foundational material for new projects. In other words, he will paint on these pieces again, hopefully bringing them back to life. Sometimes he may cut out one smaller canvas from a large experiment.  At other times, he may perceive two or three suitable compositions within the larger canvas.

With Peter Bradley also deftly showed that his paintings, drawings, and sculptures were created in tandem with the many dimensions of this artist’s life. Archival materials frequently convey the contextual details surrounding Bradley’s long creative practice, with its commercial ups and downs, and his network of associates. These historical touchstones again bring the questions of why and how we create to the forefront and do so in yet another way through how they accentuate one’s personal style evolves, as do one’s influences. The film as a whole reinforces that Bradley, like many artists, creates for something that the intrinsic experience itself provides. He is not working for the marketplace now, although in the 1970s, his life was totally interwoven with that of the New York City art world.

We see this, for example, in one wonderful print where he is looking through the wheel of an etching press in Robert Blackburn’s printmaking studio. In other photographs he is engaging with colleagues like Kenneth Noland and Clement Greenberg. Photographs additionally place him at the Guggenheim Museum, and show he was a dashing young man when he worked at the prestigious Perls Galleries as the first Black art dealer on Madison Avenue. At other points these archival images serve as the background as he tells him of his artistic evolution. In one he explains that it was the immense influence of jazz on him that led him to conclude that the work of those he says influenced him (e.g., Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, William T. Williams, etc.) was too static for his taste because the colors didn’t move enough. Bradley found color by itself rather boring; he wanted to add the feeling of motion to the perception.

Additional archival material places him at Yale. Invited by the head of the Art Department, Bradley left the school once he learned that they didn’t invite him because of his work. Rather they wanted him to eventually go around the country and sell their program to Black people. At Yale he met William T. Williams (b. 1942), a painter with whom he later shared a studio. Subsequent images are used to supplement his discussion of how an artist in their neighborhood, Kenneth Noland, discovered him. Through Noland he became close with Clement Greenberg, “Clems,” who was best known for propelling Jackson Pollock’s career. Clems would visit him at Perls and they would talk endlessly about how color supersedes subject matter. Bradley also advised Robert Doty when his put together the 1971 Contemporary Black Artists in America at the Whitney Museum and John de Menil invited him to curate the interracial De Luxe Theater exhibition (1971). As noted, he was represented by the Emmerich from 1972 through 1976. After that, no one else took him on.

Following his successes of the 1970s, the 1980s ushed in a dramatically different artistic and personal space. His mother died and his childhood home was torn down. He went through all his money and many of his paintings were lost or stolen. Homeless for a time, and too embarrassed to ask for help, it was rough going. Listening to Peter, it was clear that his art helped him survive and here too his story raises the question of how and why one creates. As he explains it, every day he is trying something new to put on the canvas. He is not attempting to produce a Peter Bradley look, just looking to paint a picture.

In summary, With Peter Bradley is an inspiring film. Seeing the artist make his work, and learning about his life, often as he sits by the fire in the old stone house where he lives, works to perfection. Anyone fascinated by an artist’s creative process will want to watch this cinematic articulation of Bradley’s experiential process-- captured through visual, musical, and verbal commentary. As I was working on this review, I found an oral history of him from 2017 that complements this in-depth film nicely. The Oral History Project, an organization dedicated to collecting, developing, and preserving the stories of distinguished visual artists of the African Diaspora did the interview [1]. Like the film, it has a dynamism and a looseness, that captures much of Peter Bradley’s personality, and does so in a way that is difficult to convey in this review.

Finally, the story would be incomplete if I failed to note that it was not until October 2021 that Peter Bradley had his first solo exhibition in New York City since 1974. His work has also regained critical recognition and received international attention among collectors.

References

The oral history is available at https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2017/01/17/peter-bradley-1.