Artist Talk: Bradley Castellanos

         


              Bradley Castellanos is an artist that utilizes photography, painting and mixed media to create images that he feels recreates a feeling of a place from his memories.  He graduated from SVA in New York with an MFA and is now creating work from the memories and feelings of his childhood home in Florida. Before Photoshop Bradley would cut the images he photographed on his 35mm camera to create collages with his abstract paintings. Over time he bagan to just paint on the photographs using resin to create a gloss coating. The idea was to blur the line between photography and painting.
              At first his imagery depicted jungle like scenery. Using photographs he took of botanical gardens he abstracted it with the other mixed medias he worked in. If you were to zoom in down the smallest pixels of the image you could see the abstract psychedelic imagery of his hand work. As technology became more available he began to utilize Photoshop as a tool to reflect his photographs into a pattern to make them more abstract before he printed them out to paint on. This idea and attention to the smaller details of his work was very interesting as was his willingness to explore those ideas.
             Bradley also worked on a series of abstract paintings that were fairly large at 4-5 feet. The idea behind them was to emphasize the psychedelic patterns in his other works by enlarging them enough to be viewed from a reasonable distance. The images were also gestural and chunky and as Bradley has stated, "Some images are hanging on for dear life".  He also did smaller versions of the work to help him feel like he was getting more work done and being productive in his studio. Overtime he realized that the 35mm film camera created a limitation on how large he could print his images, so he borrowed his friends large format camera which lead him to another limiation, cost of film and how much longer the process was.
              One thing that inspired me most about Bradley's work was the influences of current events and the people around him that changed the themes of his work and how he was able to purge those thoughts from his mind by emulating them in his work. What was also interesting was how he went about getting the photographs he needed to achieve this. By going into certain places that were abandon or industrial and unoccupied to obtain a more empy and apocolyptic sensation.
              My favorite series that Bradley showed at the presentaion was the string light figure sereies. I particuarly enjoyed the playfulness of the ghostly figures being the light source of the scene and the moodiness of the paint that decorated the forest landscape.  It in a way feels like memories or a fariy tale coming to life in an abstrat way.