Joe Bradley Quotes

#1. People weep at music all the time, because music gives form to some abstract level of integration.

Joe Bradley

#2. I've always liked the fact that galleries are free to visit in New York.

Joe Bradley

#3. Painting has this ability to send the viewer [backward], but it's also this physical object in the room with you. It's always knocking you back into the present moment, which I find very pleasurable.

Joe Bradley

#4. I don't really get excited about good things happening to me.

Joe Bradley

#5. Money issue looms so large in art now. And it has absolutely nothing to do with art.

Joe Bradley

#6. Maybe I don't have the same sense of humor. Maybe people aren't comfortable gauging a painting that way. They think that if it's a painting then it must be serious. I think Picasso can be hilarious, to name one example.

Joe Bradley

#7. You have the 20th century wrapping up and everything is moving at this breakneck speed? And then, painting is still walking. It's just a very human activity that takes time.

Joe Bradley

#8. I'm not interested in popular culture, particularly. I'm not against it, I'm not avoiding it, but I'm not interested in it as a force in life.

Joe Bradley

#9. There are different kinds of concentration required to make a painting, different kinds of being present.

Joe Bradley

#10. I've had phases where the compass point seems lost. It can happen for various reasons, among them, that you're trying to do something outside your skill set; your skills have to catch up with the things you see in your head. But it's important to make all of those paintings, even the failed ones.

Joe Bradley

#11. The thing is that the money issue looms so large in art now. And it has absolutely nothing to do with art. If you're painting goes for ten grand or a hundred grand, it doesn't make painting any easier. And it doesn't make the painting any better if it goes for a hundred grand.

Joe Bradley

#12. The era of television in which I grew up was much simpler than now. Its conventions were quite transparent and fun to think about. Who could ever remember the plot of those shows?

Joe Bradley

#13. I think what's happened in art criticism, or art thinking, in last 30 or 40 years is a confusion between the "what" - the subject - and the "how." Most attention goes to the "what," but it's the "how" that's the important part - how something is brought into being.

Joe Bradley

#14. I love looking at sculpture, but there's some sort of spell that's broken with it.

Joe Bradley

#15. A picture can be funny and also weep inducing. One cries for many reasons. The state of weeping, for me, is induced by recognition of a rarified level of integration - thinking about what must it have taken to reach that integration.

Joe Bradley

#16. I think that time moves slower in painting. And maybe that accounts for a lot of the anxiety around painting in the last 40 or 50 years.

Joe Bradley

#17. Paintings exist in the present tense, yet somehow, because of how it's structured, it can move backwards through time as well.

Joe Bradley

#18. I think, with abstraction, it's easy to fall into a sort of pastiche.

Joe Bradley

#19. I think you do kind of slip into a trance when you look at a painting. At least I do.

Joe Bradley

#20. I think painting has that unique potential to project opposing viewpoints.

Joe Bradley

#21. There's something retro about the pop culture references in the paintings, so I'd imagine it's not as much a pop culture reference as a pop art reference.

Joe Bradley

#22. It's a funny semantic turn - when someone paints a landscape, no one says they "borrowed" it, only that they painted it.

Joe Bradley

#23. I think that painting relates very neatly to inner travel and the exploration of inner worlds. With painting, I always get the impression that you're sort of entering into a shared space.

Joe Bradley

#24. I'm not a planner. I should be more articulate about what the imagery means, but I don't have a good reason for it; it's just there.

Joe Bradley

#25. A good painting has to do about 12 things at once.

Joe Bradley

#26. The internet might be a convenience, but it hasn't yet, for me, been a fundamental reordering. These things are supposed to be time-savers, so you have more time standing at your easel if you so choose.

Joe Bradley

#27. When there's a painting in the room, my eye goes right to it. It's like if you go into a bar and there's a television on, you can't take your eyes off the television. Paintings have that effect on me. It's where my eye settles.

Joe Bradley

#28. I remember looking at books when I was in high school, but I don't think I really stood in front of a genuine painting or sculpture until I was out of high school.

Joe Bradley

#29. I always like being surprised and sort of caught off guard by other people's work. So it doesn't cause me any anxiety to explore different avenues.

Joe Bradley

#30. Technology's always changing. There was a time where oil painting was a new technology. That changed painting.

Joe Bradley

#31. I give myself different roles. I think in different ways on different days. Sometimes I think of it as cooking - different flavors and different ingredients. Sometimes I think of it like orchestrating a piece of music with all the different instruments.

Joe Bradley

#32. I suppose some people find their voice later than others, but it's interesting to look back at really early work to see that there's some kernel or a Rosetta Stone, in a way.

Joe Bradley

#33. I can only think of a handful of artists that can make a funny painting or a funny sculpture without it feeling coined in someway.

Joe Bradley

#34. I'm also interested in something that can happen later in life. In midstream, you can suddenly take what looks like a detour; I'm sure I've taken many detours.

Joe Bradley