Bradford is best known for her paintings of swimmers, superheroes, and ships that critics describe as simultaneously representational and abstract, luminous, and richly metaphorical.
She began painting when she was living in Maine in the 1970s. She moved to New York City in the ’80s, but returns each summer with her spouse, Jane O’Wyatt, to her home in Brunswick.
Her work has been the subject of one-person shows at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (2013) and Modern Museum of Fort Worth Texas (2017) and is currently the subject of a survey exhibit at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, which will travel to several venues.
"My figures appear against ephemeral grounds that toggle between the representational space of dark sky, ocean waters, and abstract fields of color. The vastness of the canvas becomes an intentional place for imagination, as the paintings convey a personal universe of my own making, a universe populated with characters who explore who we are, how we fit together visually, and how we all stand next to each other. I find there are quite a lot of options for how to look and be with one another."