Meet Kip Bradley: Outdoor Painter

We had the good fortune of connecting with Kip Bradley and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Kip, what inspires you?
I am interested in how art can create community and enhance the individual, I admire and engage more with authenticity than technical ability. However, I really love disappearing into a moment and place while creating.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I have had a few different careers in the arts. I began as a community artist helping inner city kids, youth offenders, adults and children with physical or intellectual differences make art. Then for a while I pursued a career making paintings on bent shaped aluminum. They were attractive, shiny and ‘cool’. I wonder if maybe they were a bit too intellectualized. They were labor intensive but eventually stopped being challenging. Next, I decided to go back to running community art programs and took a position at the Telfair Museum of Art. As their studio programs manager, I ran and continue to run classes for both children and adults. Instead of the labor-intensive metal work, I picked up my sketchbook. With whatever spare time there was, I started making observational watercolors. This evolved into an effort to paint daily, completing a piece every single setting. Often completing a single sketch book every week. The last few years, I have mostly worked in oils, outdoors. Each painting is typically completed in about an hour and half or less. I love finding new locations as well as painting the same places or subjects repeatedly. The light, in nature, changes so quickly my personal goal is to cut the average painting time closer to 45 minutes. Rather than work to make a painting a kind of perfected statement, I’d rather it be a perfect response in the moment that includes a sense of self, place, and time. I don’t ever rework or touch up paintings, kind of like swinging a baseball bat, you either found the moment or missed it. There certainly are a lot of foul balls in this process! With my position running studio programs at the museum, I have been lucky to find a community of painters that join me weekly to explore pleasures of painting outdoors “En Plein Air”.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?

I feel a bit overwhelmed by the question, but maybe that’s why I love observational painting in Savannah. It’s all so wonderful. From the tranquil and ornate squares and historic homes of downtown to the majestic marshland along the island’s expressway or near Skidaway Island to the fun ghost tours and large walking tour groups. I grew up in New Hampshire and remember clearly, how dramatic the changing leaves were in the fall. It’s taken a long time for me to find that extreme type of color variance here but now I see the color and drama in every season of the marshes. I’d like for people to be here long enough to also realize this beauty. I wouldn’t miss taking the guest on a sky line tour at the plant riverside, or the bohemian. All 22 squares in Savannah have a unique personality that’s fun to discover, and their great places to eat lunch or sit a sip coffee. A couple small but significantly overlooked spots are in laurel park south cemetery Slave burials, with hand carved and personalized stone as well as the marked area of stranger burials. While they are not ornate or grand moments of history and are significant in their subtlety.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
There are so many people that have supported me and continue to applaud my efforts. I am always humbled by those who choose to participate in my programs and ideas. There is an essay I read in grad school that has been stuck in my head for 10-15 years now called “The Pleasure and Meaning of Making” by Ellen Dissanayake. In this essay Dissanayake expresses her concern that we have become disconnected from the base pleasure of making art simply because it is fun ” joie de faire” she calls it. Dissanayake argues that in different times throughout history, the purpose or art had more to do with community building than anything else.I think I have come to believe that art is both about appreciating self, and surroundings in the present moment.

Website: www.kipbradley.com

Instagram: @jkipbrad

Facebook: kip bradley

Image Credits
Kip Bradley Oil on Panel 2021