Uncategorized Archives - Bradleyboboc

e-book release

This week I am excited to announce the upcoming release of my e-book! Set to come out in mid-June, the book will showcase a collection of 25 new paintings, supplemented by additional sculptures and photos. The principal aim of this work is to explore the theme of still life as it relates to hand-painted signage from Google Street View, real life household objects, and the abstraction of each through the processes of painting and sculpting.

This book will serve as an artist statement, and I look to use it as a means to explain the context of my work in greater detail. With any luck, this project will be a vehicle for others to engage more deeply with the art that I create.

Brad2020-05-07T15:07:00+00:00May 7th, 2020|

a sir and his dog

It was a joy to make this video and I think the public can expect additional episodes in the future. The idea came from already having all of these objects in my apartment. I had made the “sir” as a one-off sculpture a few months ago, and he has a very strong presence. At 16” tall, he guards his favorite Purex bottle with conviction.

A month or so after he was created, I decided to make the Fabuloso dog, which may have been one of the more difficult projects I’ve ever completed. Over 3 days, I combined 7 pieces—a Fabuloso bottle for the snout, a Pine-Sol bottle for the body, 4 soda bottles for the legs, and a funnel for the tail—to make a watertight sculpture. The sealant, WaterWeld, completely burned and stained my fingers, but it was worth it. After all this, I filled the vessel back up with the Fabuloso and added the ears and tongue from the bottle’s label.

For this movie, my goal was to showcase the lively character of these sculptures. The sir would be bold and stern, yet show a great deal of love for his bottle and his dog. Coincidentally, the dog has his own bottle that he enjoys retrieving for the sir. Together they make a great pair, and I look forward to their future chronicles.

Brad2020-04-30T16:26:09+00:00April 30th, 2020|

background on the bottles

This week I wanted to touch on the background behind my bottle sculptures. I initially became interested in portraying these items after coming across hand-painted signage from Los Angeles. Ironically, this investigation developed through the use of Google Street View, as I had just moved to New York from Los Angeles a couple months before. Over the course of a few months, I collected over 500 images of storefronts that showcased detergents, milk, and other household products.

I found these bottles to be endearing because they confidently defied standards of photo-realism. The use of Google also proved to be to my advantage because many of the bottles have been painted over throughout the years, but Google’s records extend back to 2007. The photo quality around this time is very poor, though I actually appreciated this obscurity and wanted to capture it in my own art.

At first I began by creating paintings with a blurry quality, but I knew that I wanted to adapt these images into 3-dimensional forms as well. I felt that paper mache would lend itself well to this because of its simple character. As a result, I began to convert the images into sculptures, doing my best to interpret their blurry and misshapen quality. The images below outline my transcription process, from the Google screenshots, to drawings, and finally the sculptures themselves.

Brad2020-04-23T22:16:00+00:00April 23rd, 2020|

bottle ballet / welcome!

I want to start off by thanking everybody visiting this page. The support that I’ve received in my first year of painting has been overwhelming, and this backing has continually pushed me to keep creating. I’m starting this blog now as a means to contextualize my art for these supporters, as well as others who may come across it.

As my practice has expanded over the past months, I’ve found it difficult to explain the scope of what I’m doing through social media alone. By establishing this platform, my goal is to give people an understanding of my art so that they may engage with it on a deeper level. Though I never thought of myself as someone who would run a blog, I think that making myself vulnerable in this sense will allow others to understand the process behind my artistic decisions.

For my first post, I used some of my latest sculptures to create an animated ballet. Set to a piece by composer Judy Jackson, this video exhibits the wayward behavior of 4 bottles left on the scene of a still life. As far as the sculptures themselves, I will explain their origin in future posts, though I will showcase them below. For now, enjoy the video and look forward to weekly posts on this page.

-BB

Brad2020-04-17T22:16:55+00:00April 17th, 2020|