MADISON BRADFIELD’S ANCIENT WORLD

by Emma Riva

Madison Bradfield loves cloudy days. While the sun might suit some people, for the Natrona Heights-born painter and printmaker, grey skies are soothing. “I find it very serene. I don’t have to squint or anything. It just feels right, comfortable,” she said. Bradfield’s work speaks to that ability to find beauty in what others might find sad or foreboding. Even in her paintings of Italy, where some might gravitate towards floral prints and sunshine, she seeks out the fog of Venice and the moody hills of Basilicata.

Bradfield’s work might be familiar to anyone who’s grabbed an espresso at La Prima or a glass of wine from Allora Wine Group at one of their warehouse tastings. Her boyfriend, Brian M. Cubellis, is a founding member of Allora Wine Group and saw the connection between Bradfield’s artistry and the world of wine. There’s an ancient, romantic quality to Bradfield’s work. Her linocut pieces are stark black and white images that feel straight out of a Medieval tapestry—they have the sense that they could have been made three hundred years ago or three days ago.

Though Bradfield is of English descent, she grew up in a community full of Italian-American aesthetics near New Kensington. “I always appreciated the food and the closeness. It just makes me feel a certain warmth,” she explained. But her interest in the Mediterranean also came from her love for history. She studied history in college, with a focus on the Greco-Roman period. She recalls looking at coffee table artbooks of classical art and architecture and feeling inspired for her art practice throughout her life.

One of her most striking paintings is a black Italian greyhound, its head slightly cocked to the side, with a skull beside it. Its body is lean and sinewy and its eyes dart away from the viewer. Her most recent finished work is of a mourning dove, Bradfield’s favorite bird, perched in white space. Bradfield has a way of creating complex emotional undercurrents out of simple, bare images. Even her landscapes evoke feeling through the whole, not the minutia of its parts. She has a keen eye for symbolism, maybe from her background in studying the ancient world. Her work feels like it comes from the period before literacy was widespread, when cathedral etchings and paintings were what everyday people saw themselves in.  

“I like to use animals to express my thoughts and feelings. I’m not always good at articulating my thoughts, so I like to use animals in that way. Since forever, we’ve ascribed feelings to animals, but they don’t know any of it. Animals just kind of ‘be,’” she reflected. She sees meaning in the stilted, stagnant quality of religious art from antiquity like Russian Orthodox icons, which convey divine sublimity through stillness. Bradfield grew up attending Methodist services where there are few images, and her first time seeing depictions of the crucifixion at Catholic mass made an impression. Her work harnesses the power that those symbols have—a glass of wine, an olive branch, a dove, a bull. Even her painting of Michael Imperioli as Christopher Moltisanti in The Sopranos has the quality of a religious icon, with his melancholy black eyes staring off into the distance beyond the painting.

She creates her linocuts by etching into erasers, then using black ink and stamping it onto a paper. Though the process of carving into the eraser is delicate, Bradfield finds it meditative to work on them. She’s recently branched more into portraiture, painting street scenes from small Italian towns where she and Cubellis have befriended locals. But she works at her own pace, taking several months to complete a work and only declaring it done when it feels right.

Maybe it’s the fact that the image has decided itself when it is done what gives the work such an otherworldly quality. Bradfield’s practice shows art beyond its sole decorative purpose, that images come from somewhere deep and far away, either within the artist’s soul or beyond the veil of what we can see. Looking at her work allows each of us to go to that place, too.

Emma Riva is the founder of Petrichor.

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