If the art world is going to change, it’s going to start with Evan Bradbury, both my boss (head curator of Carnelian Art Gallery) and exhibiting artist in the gallery’s current show, “Finding Color In the Chaos,” which is on display until April 30.
Bradbury brought some in-progress paintings to the gallery earlier this week to give me an inside look at his artistic process. He has a soft spot acrylic paints in particular. Birch board is his surface of choice when creating. Bradbury will sometimes start an artwork by covering the board with Gesso, which is traditionally a mix of animal blue binder, chalk and white pigment. He calls this the most “meditative” part of his process. Then, whatever comes out is whatever comes out. Sometimes Bradbury’s paintings take on an urban, geometric aesthetic. Others are emotional splashes of vibrant color. Even more are representations of landscapes and forms. He doesn’t like to box himself into any one medium.
Lately, his works have been made in response to an encounter with a brain tumor just over a half decade ago. Bradbury was diagnosed with what’s known as an acoustic neuroma, which affected many of his bodily functions on the right side, including his hearing, sight and mobility, among other things. If you see one of Bradbury’s geometric works hanging about the gallery, you’re witnessing a man trying to prove to himself that he can still do what he loves in the wake of a life-changing medical condition.
While painting in the gallery’s back studio space, Bradbury also opened up about his ambitions for reshaping Madison’s (and perhaps the state’s) arts scene. To him, that starts with Carnelian Art Gallery. His hope is that our gallery seeds the development of more art galleries in the area, and more arts activity across Wisconsin during these trying political times. It’s been my privilege to help him achieve that mission since I started as marketing director six months ago.
“I promise you with every fiber of my being that the world is a better place with more art in it,” Bradbury said. “I intend to prove it.”
Way back before Bradbury opened Carnelian Art Gallery, he was a “wacky kid” who started “painting and drawing before memory.” He was inspired by his late uncle on his mom’s side, who was a professional oil painter who created “a lot of Florida seascapes” and other representational works.
A Madison native, Bradbury was heavily involved in the Children’s Theater of Madison doing close to 30 or “maybe more” places, both on stage and backstage. He attended Lake View Elementary School, Sherman Middle School and East High School.
After graduating high school, Bradbury went on to study poetry in Milwaukee for two years. Subsequently, he attended the Madison Area Technical College to try and become a police officer. Upon figuring out he didn’t like that, Bradbury embarked on a move to New York City to “focus on painting and see if there was a life.”
There, he attended several ateliers, including the Art Students League of New York in the heart of Manhattan.
“That was life changing,” Bradbury said. “This was a gorgeous, great big Victorian manner surrounded by massive sky scrapers and everything. It felt every bit like Hogwarts. It was a real bastion of at. Jackson Pollock and Georgia O’ Keefe went there.
“While there I also had an opportunity work as an unpaid gallery hand to a scrappy little gallery … Greenpoint Gallery. I was there only for a few years. I, then, came back and started my artistic career in Madison.”
Fast forward to 2012, and Bradbury opened a small, do-it-yourself, mixed-use art space called Bright Red Studios. He often speaks about how he learned a lot of lessons as a curator there, many of which he now applies to Carnelian Art Gallery, which opened in March 2024.
“I love it,” Bradbury said of being a curator.