KATHERINE BRADFORD

“I think notebooks play a big role in a visual artist’s practice. The whole idea of making a painting or work of art causes people to fail. But if you think you’re doing something private, I think you relax a little more, and better things happen.”

Katherine Bradford is best known for her paintings of boats and of superheroes. She approaches these iconic images with a sense of playful adventure and tenderness: “One thing that I really revere is awkwardness, because it implies a kind of vulnerability.”

Bradford was a longtime teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, and her work has appeared in numerous solo and group gallery shows and museum exhibitions. Her paintings are held by many private and public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum.

For her work with Plumb, Bradford drew on her longtime practice of making calendars by hand. “I love the idiosyncratic mark a human hand can make,” she says. “Maybe it’s a way of going through your days, and your life, to let a little bit of mishap in.”

Bradford currently works in both Brooklyn and Maine.

Plumb Notebooks

• Mini Superhero Notebook
• Short Stack Journal
• Titanic Sketchbook

Solo exhibitions

• Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, NY
• Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME
• Steven Harvey Fine Art, New York, NY
• Samson Projects, Boston, MA
• Sarah Moody Gallery of Art, University of Alabama, AL

Group exhibitions

• ZieherSmith Gallery, New York, NY
• Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA
• Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA
• American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY
• Canada (Gallery), New York, NY