Bradley, David Acrylic On Canvas “Pueblo Still Life”

David Bradley · Minnesota Chippewa

“Pueblo Still Life”

At the center sits a polychrome olla, its bird-and-flower design turned toward the viewer; around it Bradley lays out the harvest — a cut watermelon, a melon, red chiles, and three ears of corn in yellow, red, and blue. A shell pendant rests at the table’s edge, and a drum stands to the right. Through the window, a woman carries a black-on-white jar on her head while a mother and child cross the plaza behind her, adobe rising toward a banded sunset. A striped clown figure leans in from the doorway with a melon of his own.

Bradley builds his paintings this way: flat color, clean line, and a room where the ordinary and the ceremonial share a table. He is one of the most recognized painters working in Santa Fe, and among the defining voices in contemporary Native painting.