Brad Widness

I have always been fascinated with the interior landscape of memory and imagination juxtaposed against the physical spaces in which we move and act.   My vision is to transform the spaces I  sense around me, into the spaces of thought, imagination and deep feeling.    I do this mainly through continual re-synthesis of the materials and elements of drawing and printmaking.  The resultant images use sky versus land, interior versus exterior, form (mass) versus void and intimate spaces versus the expansive prairie landscape  as metaphors of a deeper space within myself that is continuously fluid and changing.  

The work can also be read as images of fleeting glimpses of everyday reality - defined by changing light.   I want to express the ever-changing character of how we perceive the corporeal, tangible world around us.   A world that appears in one instant to be stable, static, unchanging, seems the next moment to be miraculously brand new – as though seeing if for the very first time.   Through the process of intense drawing and image making, the work has become a landscape/still life ‘window’ into the fluid world of perceived forms, objects and spaces.   In this spirit of fleeting, ever-changing perceptions, it is also to be seen and felt as the flat wall object that it is - an object that occupies a real space on the wall having its own integrity of surface, plane and material presence of board, paper and ink.  

As my work develops, I intend to keep ‘pushing the edge’ concerning this fluidity and reflexivity of imagery and form – how little do I really need in a forms basic referential qualities to keep the fluidity alive – form and image pushed to their purest ‘essence’ as simple materiality, pure visual element, yet maximum metaphorical aliveness.   In this state I envision the work to have increasingly less reference to literal specifics or naturalistic appearances.   Pure form, surface and shape, in and of themselves and within a very particular order and tension, will be the conveyors of  ‘essence’ – that of place, light and the space of deep human memory and experience.