Meet Virginia
Alabama Art Colony
Artist
Lake Martin artist Virginia
Bradshaw shows what it's like to color outside the lines
by Lane McMurray Saunders
In elementary school, Virginia Bradshaw, spent many hours trying
to draw the blue horse pictured on the package wrapper of Blue Horse notebook
paper. “I thought that was the most beautiful horse I had ever seen,” she says
smiling. “That was my first recollection of drawing. I spent my whole elementary
school years trying to draw that horse but I never succeeded.”
At age 14, the little girl Virginia began formal art lessons and her teacher, impressed with one of her creative designs, sent the design to the Alabama State Fair and it won a first place ribbon. “I won that award with this painting when I was 14 years old,” she says, reaching down and picking up the framed artwork resting on the leg of her chair. “I wanted to study textile design,” she says wistfully, “but it was discouraged.”
Her crystal blue eyes look intent as she talks of how the state fair award set in motion a life full of imaginative art and colorful, rhythmic paintings.
“A story about my award came out in The Outlook and two or three weeks later I received a beautiful book from Adelia Russell — Art, Then and Now by Kathryn Dean Lee. I loved that book! I donated it to the Alabama Room at the junior college here. Not many people know about Katie. She was an Alexander City native and taught art at the University of Chicago.”
The conversation switches back to Virginia Bradshaw’s recollections of her first formal art lessons. “I took art lessons from Sarah Towery. She’s a wonderful, wonderful art person in Alexander City. All the students in my class had strong personalities,” she says, laughing as she names the students in her class, some of whom have gone on to be professional artists. “We were all so different in the way we handled a canvas. My interest was in abstract art, which was popular in the late 1940’s and 1950’s and she funneled me in that direction. She let us go with what we could do…she guided us with the talent we had.”
At age 16 a dark headed young Virginia sits for a formal portrait in Helen Clark Sydel’s studio in Atlanta. The portrait was a gift to her parents from the artist. Dressed in a burgundy and red formal shantung gown, hands resting demurely in her lap, her feet (not seen) in bobbie socks and penny loafers, Virginia is intrigued by the artist and her husband. “I was so excited during those trips to Atlanta. I was just fascinated by the Sydels. I thought Helen and Paul Sydel were such a romantic couple and so intellectual. He would sit on the patio, dressed in a turtleneck and read poetry,” she remembers, “while Helen painted my portrait.”
Sydel would talk to Virginia as she painted her portrait leaving some lasting impressions in the young woman’s mind.
Life came quickly after that…high school graduation, college life at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, marriage to Sam Bradshaw, raising a family of three children, and working with Alexander City’s Retired Senior Citizens Program. Through these years she always managed to find a way to transform ordinary materials into poetic statements.
“I don’t think there’s ever been a time when I didn’t do any art or craft things. I’ve always been creative. Even when the children were young I would paint on wood slats, flowers, itty-bitty pictures of mushrooms. I gave them all away. Wish I had some of them now. I didn’t paint on paper or canvas but I have always somehow been at it.”
A serious bout with lung cancer several years ago sent her art off in a new direction.
“My art helped me through my cancer…it made it easier. I was always hopeful most days but my world changed tremendously. When I would go for chemo treatments I couldn’t sleep so I would take a sketchpad with me. I started putting my feelings down, writing my feelings in a black and white design,” she says.
She shows me one of the designs, framed in black and matted in red, and I see a spider’s web of feelings radiating from larger words — cancer, fear, family, love, healing, lung, and breathing — centered in the middle of the design. “This work was very spontaneous and very hopeful. I’ve reprinted these designs several times. They were popular with people in the clinic.”
Now, five and a half years later, cured of lung cancer, she faces life with a fervent passion for painting and creating. She is devoted to her career and very confident in her ability. She believes in what she is doing.
“The public likes realistic things but my art is much more emotional than that,” she says with passion. “I nearly stifled my art trying to paint pretty pictures…that was not my technical ability!
“I have truly had a lesson in ‘art is in the eye of the beholder,’” she says laughing. “I remember my art teacher talking about that. Anyway, I was riding down Fishpond Road one day. I have a keen interest in wild flowers. I saw what I thought was this green plant with beautiful pink flowers. I was quite a distance away from it. And when I got up close to it — the wild flowers were egg cartons on the ends of a yucca plant! And I had truly thought they were beautiful wild flowers and then I thought — that’s what they mean — that art is in the eye of the beholder. What’s good art and what’s bad art, to the people who made that yucca plant, who put those eggs on that yucca plant that was beautiful to them and to me, who was very critical of that kind of thing. I try to remind myself of that when I’m looking at other art.”
Discussing art and artists she feels that anyone can be an artist. “I think everyone is an artist. We put that word on too high a plane.” She then talks about children and their creativity and how in the early formative years how quickly that art ability can be stifled with criticism.
“I never gave my children a coloring book, just a blank piece of paper and some colors. One day my older son comes home from school and asks me to buy him a coloring book so he can learn to color in the lines.”
Bradshaw has never colored in the lines and is not about to try and start now.
A recent showing at McDavid and Company featured a 40-year retrospective of her artwork. The day of this story she was gathering her work for her show at the Heritage Museum of Art in Talladega.
She shows me a collection of crosses she has created from ordinary discarded materials. A large cross, decorated with an array of found objects and rocks, gathered on the wooden cross with wire, is very symbolic in line and form. Other crosses are more formal composed of obsidian rock or other stones.
“I love to collect junk,” she says, opening drawers to let me peak at her collections. “See anything you want?” she says laughing. Her collection of artifacts is an exciting hodgepodge of unserviceable machine parts, chunks of metal, scraps of old mattress wire, sea glass, rocks, sticks, trinkets and various objects she has picked up on walks on the shores of Lake Martin and her travels around the world. Other drawers hold semi-precious stones, and obsidian and silica. I even see a small turtle skeleton resting on a small box.
She speaks of seeing Picasso’s bull head sculpture composed of a leather bicycle seat and handlebars. Her wonderment of seeing how that sculpture was formed from simple discarded objects brings a conversation about a deer sculpture she and her grandson plan to make from an old metal rake head and a plow handle. “Wish I knew how to weld,” she says.
We look through her paintings gathered for the show in Talladega and I see her work is bold and bright with shape and texture that draws the eye to the canvas. I want to touch some of the art, but I don’t. “You can touch it,” she says, seeing I want to feel the texture of the raised paint. Some of the larger colorful paintings — one in tones of pink with a woman’s face and another of flowers on a background of yellows — have a poster-like quality in their abstractness.
Her later work speaks of her recent experiences in Olderkesi, Kenya. Her bold paintings of African women in tones of brown with red and oranges and textures of blue speak of the hardships of the women there. Her experiences in Africa are taking shape in a whole new body of work.
“I knew I wouldn’t sit down and paint in Africa but I looked for sights and emotions that moved me — the acacia trees, the cows, the African women’s colorful shukas and the tans and reds of the dry dusty earth. I’ve tried to capture those things in my art. It’s been difficult.
“My type of painting? I guess it’s loose. I like water media,” she says. “I paint fast and I’m sloppy. I get it all over everything, me, my car. I start painting on the canvas and then an image appears.”
Her pallet changes constantly — a cookie sheet, a butcher board, or a canvas that will become a new painting.
She’s adventurous and open to new possibilities. After her mother’s death she took all her mother’s pearls and glued them to a wooden sculpture of a cow. She named the sculpture Pearlie. After closer inspection she realized the cow was actually a bull.
“A long time ago I realized that many people who are realistic painters can’t do what I do and I can’t do what they do,” she says. “I’ve been to most of the world’s major museums more than one time. I am overwhelmed and inspired by the art. I’ve stood there thinking I can’t do that but I realize that the things I can do are okay. They may not suit the guy next door but they’re okay.
“I get very inspired when I view other people’s work.”
She speaks of her love of the works of Matisse and Picasso. “I love Matisse — the simplicity of his later work. I try to simplify my work but I end up putting more into it. And. Oh, I love Picasso,” she sighs. “I absolutely adore Picasso. I think he is the genius they’ve made him out to be. I’ve been to exhibits of his all over the world.”
Lake Martin also inspires her to be creative. “Lake Martin has always been a part of my life since I was a child. Sitting on the shores I get inspired to do other things. We have the most beautiful view of the lake from our family cabin. I love what’s happening to the lake now. I thing it’s wonderful but I’m also nostalgic about the way it use to be.”
In her biography she says, “Freedom to create is primary in the pursuit of my art. I am inspired by nature, junk, color, shapes, and people.”
Her works include paintings, drawings, found art sculpture, ceramics, semi-precious stonework and glass painting. She’s had shows and won awards and her works hang in the permanent collection of the Sarah C. Towery Art Colony Collection at the Board of Education in Alexander City. She has a B. S. degree in education with a major in Art from Auburn University in Montgomery and has spent many years volunteering in the public school system.
The collected found objects from her life and travels that adorn her artwork are all symbols of a woman expressing herself with the happiness of just being alive and having the freedom to enjoy and be part of every sun’s rising.
by Lane McMurray Saunders
In elementary school, Virginia Bradshaw, spent many hours trying
to draw the blue horse pictured on the package wrapper of Blue Horse notebook
paper. “I thought that was the most beautiful horse I had ever seen,” she says
smiling. “That was my first recollection of drawing. I spent my whole elementary
school years trying to draw that horse but I never succeeded.”At age 14, the little girl Virginia began formal art lessons and her teacher, impressed with one of her creative designs, sent the design to the Alabama State Fair and it won a first place ribbon. “I won that award with this painting when I was 14 years old,” she says, reaching down and picking up the framed artwork resting on the leg of her chair. “I wanted to study textile design,” she says wistfully, “but it was discouraged.”
Her crystal blue eyes look intent as she talks of how the state fair award set in motion a life full of imaginative art and colorful, rhythmic paintings.
“A story about my award came out in The Outlook and two or three weeks later I received a beautiful book from Adelia Russell — Art, Then and Now by Kathryn Dean Lee. I loved that book! I donated it to the Alabama Room at the junior college here. Not many people know about Katie. She was an Alexander City native and taught art at the University of Chicago.”
The conversation switches back to Virginia Bradshaw’s recollections of her first formal art lessons. “I took art lessons from Sarah Towery. She’s a wonderful, wonderful art person in Alexander City. All the students in my class had strong personalities,” she says, laughing as she names the students in her class, some of whom have gone on to be professional artists. “We were all so different in the way we handled a canvas. My interest was in abstract art, which was popular in the late 1940’s and 1950’s and she funneled me in that direction. She let us go with what we could do…she guided us with the talent we had.”
At age 16 a dark headed young Virginia sits for a formal portrait in Helen Clark Sydel’s studio in Atlanta. The portrait was a gift to her parents from the artist. Dressed in a burgundy and red formal shantung gown, hands resting demurely in her lap, her feet (not seen) in bobbie socks and penny loafers, Virginia is intrigued by the artist and her husband. “I was so excited during those trips to Atlanta. I was just fascinated by the Sydels. I thought Helen and Paul Sydel were such a romantic couple and so intellectual. He would sit on the patio, dressed in a turtleneck and read poetry,” she remembers, “while Helen painted my portrait.”
Sydel would talk to Virginia as she painted her portrait leaving some lasting impressions in the young woman’s mind.
Life came quickly after that…high school graduation, college life at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, marriage to Sam Bradshaw, raising a family of three children, and working with Alexander City’s Retired Senior Citizens Program. Through these years she always managed to find a way to transform ordinary materials into poetic statements.
“I don’t think there’s ever been a time when I didn’t do any art or craft things. I’ve always been creative. Even when the children were young I would paint on wood slats, flowers, itty-bitty pictures of mushrooms. I gave them all away. Wish I had some of them now. I didn’t paint on paper or canvas but I have always somehow been at it.”
A serious bout with lung cancer several years ago sent her art off in a new direction.
“My art helped me through my cancer…it made it easier. I was always hopeful most days but my world changed tremendously. When I would go for chemo treatments I couldn’t sleep so I would take a sketchpad with me. I started putting my feelings down, writing my feelings in a black and white design,” she says.
She shows me one of the designs, framed in black and matted in red, and I see a spider’s web of feelings radiating from larger words — cancer, fear, family, love, healing, lung, and breathing — centered in the middle of the design. “This work was very spontaneous and very hopeful. I’ve reprinted these designs several times. They were popular with people in the clinic.”
Now, five and a half years later, cured of lung cancer, she faces life with a fervent passion for painting and creating. She is devoted to her career and very confident in her ability. She believes in what she is doing.
“The public likes realistic things but my art is much more emotional than that,” she says with passion. “I nearly stifled my art trying to paint pretty pictures…that was not my technical ability!
“I have truly had a lesson in ‘art is in the eye of the beholder,’” she says laughing. “I remember my art teacher talking about that. Anyway, I was riding down Fishpond Road one day. I have a keen interest in wild flowers. I saw what I thought was this green plant with beautiful pink flowers. I was quite a distance away from it. And when I got up close to it — the wild flowers were egg cartons on the ends of a yucca plant! And I had truly thought they were beautiful wild flowers and then I thought — that’s what they mean — that art is in the eye of the beholder. What’s good art and what’s bad art, to the people who made that yucca plant, who put those eggs on that yucca plant that was beautiful to them and to me, who was very critical of that kind of thing. I try to remind myself of that when I’m looking at other art.”
Discussing art and artists she feels that anyone can be an artist. “I think everyone is an artist. We put that word on too high a plane.” She then talks about children and their creativity and how in the early formative years how quickly that art ability can be stifled with criticism.
“I never gave my children a coloring book, just a blank piece of paper and some colors. One day my older son comes home from school and asks me to buy him a coloring book so he can learn to color in the lines.”
Bradshaw has never colored in the lines and is not about to try and start now.
A recent showing at McDavid and Company featured a 40-year retrospective of her artwork. The day of this story she was gathering her work for her show at the Heritage Museum of Art in Talladega.
She shows me a collection of crosses she has created from ordinary discarded materials. A large cross, decorated with an array of found objects and rocks, gathered on the wooden cross with wire, is very symbolic in line and form. Other crosses are more formal composed of obsidian rock or other stones.
“I love to collect junk,” she says, opening drawers to let me peak at her collections. “See anything you want?” she says laughing. Her collection of artifacts is an exciting hodgepodge of unserviceable machine parts, chunks of metal, scraps of old mattress wire, sea glass, rocks, sticks, trinkets and various objects she has picked up on walks on the shores of Lake Martin and her travels around the world. Other drawers hold semi-precious stones, and obsidian and silica. I even see a small turtle skeleton resting on a small box.
She speaks of seeing Picasso’s bull head sculpture composed of a leather bicycle seat and handlebars. Her wonderment of seeing how that sculpture was formed from simple discarded objects brings a conversation about a deer sculpture she and her grandson plan to make from an old metal rake head and a plow handle. “Wish I knew how to weld,” she says.
We look through her paintings gathered for the show in Talladega and I see her work is bold and bright with shape and texture that draws the eye to the canvas. I want to touch some of the art, but I don’t. “You can touch it,” she says, seeing I want to feel the texture of the raised paint. Some of the larger colorful paintings — one in tones of pink with a woman’s face and another of flowers on a background of yellows — have a poster-like quality in their abstractness.
Her later work speaks of her recent experiences in Olderkesi, Kenya. Her bold paintings of African women in tones of brown with red and oranges and textures of blue speak of the hardships of the women there. Her experiences in Africa are taking shape in a whole new body of work.
“I knew I wouldn’t sit down and paint in Africa but I looked for sights and emotions that moved me — the acacia trees, the cows, the African women’s colorful shukas and the tans and reds of the dry dusty earth. I’ve tried to capture those things in my art. It’s been difficult.
“My type of painting? I guess it’s loose. I like water media,” she says. “I paint fast and I’m sloppy. I get it all over everything, me, my car. I start painting on the canvas and then an image appears.”
Her pallet changes constantly — a cookie sheet, a butcher board, or a canvas that will become a new painting.
She’s adventurous and open to new possibilities. After her mother’s death she took all her mother’s pearls and glued them to a wooden sculpture of a cow. She named the sculpture Pearlie. After closer inspection she realized the cow was actually a bull.
“A long time ago I realized that many people who are realistic painters can’t do what I do and I can’t do what they do,” she says. “I’ve been to most of the world’s major museums more than one time. I am overwhelmed and inspired by the art. I’ve stood there thinking I can’t do that but I realize that the things I can do are okay. They may not suit the guy next door but they’re okay.
“I get very inspired when I view other people’s work.”
She speaks of her love of the works of Matisse and Picasso. “I love Matisse — the simplicity of his later work. I try to simplify my work but I end up putting more into it. And. Oh, I love Picasso,” she sighs. “I absolutely adore Picasso. I think he is the genius they’ve made him out to be. I’ve been to exhibits of his all over the world.”
Lake Martin also inspires her to be creative. “Lake Martin has always been a part of my life since I was a child. Sitting on the shores I get inspired to do other things. We have the most beautiful view of the lake from our family cabin. I love what’s happening to the lake now. I thing it’s wonderful but I’m also nostalgic about the way it use to be.”
In her biography she says, “Freedom to create is primary in the pursuit of my art. I am inspired by nature, junk, color, shapes, and people.”
Her works include paintings, drawings, found art sculpture, ceramics, semi-precious stonework and glass painting. She’s had shows and won awards and her works hang in the permanent collection of the Sarah C. Towery Art Colony Collection at the Board of Education in Alexander City. She has a B. S. degree in education with a major in Art from Auburn University in Montgomery and has spent many years volunteering in the public school system.
The collected found objects from her life and travels that adorn her artwork are all symbols of a woman expressing herself with the happiness of just being alive and having the freedom to enjoy and be part of every sun’s rising.