Amanda Bradway

We’re back home finally after 3 days of travel back and forth spanning 4,000 miles and 8 states. Life is almost back to normal. Here’s some shots of the work we hung in it’s entirety

The show was incredible and we got to meet many talented artists and reunite with old friends. Here we are with our friend Alex Despain a former Okie and friend from high school.

In summary, Portland artists are the nicest people in the world, Matt Wagner from Hellion is one of the hardest working people I know and America is an incredible place. I’ve put my shirts and tanks in our online store and should have the gallery portion of my site updated to include this new body of work as soon as the dust settles.

We spent all day tuesday setting up the work. This is our first time in Hellion’s new space and it’s incredible. You get a really great view of the space at night from the street. The opening is tonight, so here’s a preview of what we have

We got there in time to see Blaine take down his show and chat with his awesome wife Eugenie. The Oregon table was beautiful! Wish we had been here for the opening.

I made some paper scales to contribute to the background

8 hours later we finished! Our friend Alex helped us with the layout and put his retail skills to work folding shirts. Last night we found out we received a grant we applied for to help us with the show from the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition! We are overwhelmed with gratitude towards all our friends back home and here in Portland that have helped us get here, and I hope to have a life again for at least a month when I get home :)

7 months of nonstop work between the two of us and we have around 40 pieces of work ready for the show! We decided to drive up with the work since a lot of it is fragile and everything together would have been too heavy and expensive to ship. Here it is spread across the backyard getting ready to load…

Dylan had an idea for a loading system so the work would not get damaged in transit and would maximize the space we had in the Prius…

I got sick with a wretched springtime cold that’s been going around the city the week before we left. It got better and then three days before we were supposed to leave it kicked in worse. It was extremely stressful and we were afraid we would have to delay departure, but I doped up on 6 different vitamins and stayed in bed for those last few days. I managed to finish my last piece on time and Dylan helped get my new business cards and some tshirts printed so we wouldnt be behind.

The first day and a half was still rough from the sickness, lack of sleep and the altitude but Im so glad we drove! We dont get out much and the drive was completely worth the trouble. Watching the topography and climate fluctuate across 6 different states and spread for endless miles on open roads was a spiritual experience. We made it safe and cant wait to meet up at the gallery tomorrow and see the end of Blaine Fontana’s show!

Spring-ish weather has put me behind on posting progress from 2 weeks ago, so here’s what happened…

Don’t have a title for this one yet, that usually comes weeks later. Im on a strict one piece per week goal, so Ive also started a piece with some turtle shells that will be a triptych

My sister in law just moved into a new house on the outskirts of Norman. The house sits on a little piece of land with a few out buildings and one of the sheds was used by the owner to craft Native American wares as a hobby. It’s full of feathers, arrowheads, bows, hides, flint, obsidian, bones, shells and all kinds of treasures that we were allowed to help ourselves to on our last visit. These shells were attatched to some wire with some bones and feathers like he intended to do some voodoo. Im almost done with the two smaller pieces that sit on either side and enjoyed doing just the scales this time instead of trying to come up with different shapes and folds.

Very excited to announce I will be showing work at Hellion Gallery in Portland Oregon this May.  This will be my first real show since 2008 so Im excited and very nervous. Im used to doing things close to home where shows are attended by everyone you know and the community is so small it’s more of a party than an art reception. Luckily we got to meet some incredible artists and new friends up there. Everyone is so down to earth and talking to them you dont feel out of place or awkward, just a very real part of what’s going on. Ive also never really talked about my work in depth so here’s a little bit about this new series.

Sacred Symmetry is my expoloration of symmetric patterns that occur organically in nature. Ive also been interested in capturing the strength and nobility of individuals from ancient civilizations. Im especially drawn to how intwined their lives were with nature, family, and the mystical. I think we seperate all areas of our lives in the modern world to our detriment. Most people dont even feel comfortable talking about the existence of anything spiritual as our society has so stigmatized the subject with the interjection of religious fundamentalism. My opinion is that the “spiritual” is actually a category or term we use for things science has not yet proven. I have thought for a long time that science is on the brink of discovering an atom or different dimension or something that gives a solid physical definition for what we call the “spiritual” world. We know so little still about the universe and how things work so dreaming the possibilities is exciting.

Ok so a little bit about the practical side of these pieces. Inspiration can be so simple and come at times you are not expecting. I was walking through this art supply store and saw this bird on the cover of a pad velum made from layers of cut paper. I Decided to snap a photo and file it away for inspiration since I dont have Pinterest. I also picked up a set of metallic watercolors!

Then we were at this place called the Evolution Store a few months ago that had lots of skulls, insects, stones, shells etc. I bought a couple muskrat and mink skulls and decided that since Im on this headress kick, I could use some paper and make a 3-d image.

Each piece of paper is painted and cut out, then folded to make creases that add dimension. It’s been interesting to see the kind of effects a simple crease or fold can have on each petal. Then I use hot glue to adhere them to the wood.

From here Im going to marry this style with 2-d drawings and more skulls, shells and bones that I recently found in my sister-in-laws shed. Ive been working on the floor behind my register at work so the lighting is pretty bad. I’ll post this week’s creations next Monday.

This week I worked on the second in a small series of characters with floral headresses. Sometime this summer while we were in Portland, I was inspired to make these characters with petals taken from the flowers that were in bloom. It felt incredible being somewhere green and lush coming from the Oklahoma summer where we see little rain and the everything turns yellow by June. I also made some stickers to prolong the longevity of the piece. It’s sad to put so much time into a piece only to have it sell and you never see it again. Thinking about doing this with all these ladies…

Working on a new body of work and have some really great momentum going. I will be showing this latest series at a gallery in Portland, Oregon next spring (more details later). It’s taking on a kind of shamanic, supernatural, spiritual theme. I spent a lot of time this summer reading about alternate dimensions, meditation, tarot, crystals, ancient civilizations etc. and have noticed a lot of that has inspired these new works. Really excited, kinda nervous back to work I go…

Here is a preview of the piece Im working on for the group show in September called Fringe. Because of my workload this will be the only piece I can get done for this first show so Im putting a lot of work into it. The concept behind it goes something like this: Women are my heroes in general. A few months ago I was driving around and heard an NPR news piece on women in Afganistan who have started setting themselves on fire to commit suicide or escape their home environment. Self immolation has been used as a form of protest for centuries, but in this case, women are using it as an act of desperation to escape the injustice and hopelesness in their marriages. In this piece I would like to communicate their suffering, not by portraying their oppression, but by creating an atmosphere of beauty, hope and strength which is the essence of these women.
Yeah the whole person transforming into a pheonix is probably not that original but I needed to paint something with hope. Lately, Ive been trying to deal with some of the negative aspects of our reality in life, not by dwelling on the negatives that ultimately allow the same feelings to build within me, but trying to create some beauty and hope from them.

Ive been super busy with store stuff all year and feel like it’s just now calmed down enough to concentrate on my work a little more. Earlier this year I worked on a self portrait stacking doll set. Each doll was an animal that represented a part of myself/aspect of my personality. It showed at Momentum 2011 this spring. The next update is that I probably wont be doing any solo projects this year. The store takes up a lot of my time and I really feel like you can only do one thing at a time and do it well, so until it gets to the point where I can step away from work more, this is my reality and I am ok with it. I had the privilege of being asked into a sort of women’s art group in the spring. The group consists of many local artists of all ages and backgrounds that work in all different kinds of media. We will be having our first group exhibit at the end of September so more on that later. Other than that commission work is on the periphery things like designing a sleeve, a set of longboards and mural jobs 2011 has been good to me.

For the past several months my life and all creative endeavors have been put on hold to work on a house we just bought a few blocks from the store. It has taken a lot of hard work over the summer but we haven’t lived in our own space in 3 years and have never lived in a house so every minute of it has been a mixture of excitement, urgency and anticipation. I imagine once there is a place to setup a permanent studio the combination of being settled and having a permanent work space will make a large impact on my creative process.  In the meantime, I haven’t been painting much, but since we (the store) got into the Girlie Show this year, I have been working on a new Oklahoma graphic. The last Oklahoma themed shirt I did was last year around this time and it was sort of a rushed job. Although it has sold pretty well in store I’ve never really liked that it was a half hearted attempt so this one will have a lot more detail and time put into it. I will also have a piece in this year’s 12X12 on September 25 and have almost completed a new piece for our 2 year anniversary longboard deck show. This piece is a lot different than my other works but I’ve been wanting to make some of my female characters with black hair to see how the colors contrast.  These colors were inspired by the last few minutes from “March of the Penguins”.  My dog approves.