Adam Bradford - 2023

Artist's Statement

While preparing to paint this piece I thought a lot about the mood I wanted to evoke while the viewer took it all in. I struggled with this for a while, because I couldn’t decide if I wanted to show hope for our future or regret for our past. In the end I decided I wanted the viewer to feel discomfort and fear. I wanted an ugly painting that highlighted the ugly truth of our current trajectory.

I felt that too often we had been shown the facts, only to be presented with a hopeful conclusion that we could still fix this. While I truly hope that we can fix this, I feel these points have lulled us into a false sense of security. That we can worry about these problems down the line because we still have time. I hoped to create a painting that shows the utter dread of the truth. That our planet is being rapidly polluted and exploited all so we in populous and wealthy nations can consume even more.

My intent with this piece is to explore some of the most prominent problems we face, which through my own experience and what I have learned in this class are as follows: Heavy Industry, High Use of Fossil Fuels, Extreme Monoculture, and Increasingly Common Natural Disasters. The title of the piece Horsemen highlights how these could be compared to the four horsemen of the apocalypse. While I do not relish the morbid comparison, I do feel it is a frighteningly accurate one.

I used a variety of mediums to create this piece, acrylic paint, oil paint, oil pastel, marker, colored pencil, watercolor, conte crayon and black ink. The irony of using such chemically intensive mediums was not lost on me, and I found it sad yet funny to paint the ocean in oil paint while depicting an oil spill. While I acknowledge this piece is barely a drop in a metaphorical ocean, I was proud to work on it. I see change all around me and hope the tides are changing in the right direction.