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Bradley Shaffer
http://sites.google.com/site/bradleyshafferart
b.jshafr@gmail.com
I have been a working artist since I plundered my fathers’ garage for paint and paintbrushes when aged five to paint the driveway and other things. I have taken various art classes including life drawing, sculpture and printmaking since I was young and up through college. I received a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Las Vegas, Nevada in 2003. I've worked under the pseudonyms of ‘Bradley Man’ and ‘Furioso’ and I’ve signed a few pieces with my email address (not the one below). Over the years I have experimented with literary and philosophical ideas incorporated into my work. I currently reside in Los Angeles.
My work is my answer to mortality. It is an expression of the desperation of our situation with the only beautiful answer there is to a losing situation: fight anyways. Through my love of poetry, primarily Japanese Haiku and the Homeric epics, I inject directly my stream of consciousness into my art as I work. I am training myself in how to live through my work. This is very much an instant in the moment process which leads to specific messages for each viewer. One of my favorite ideas is something Picasso said: to paraphrase it, “I seek to paint what is not there.”
The act of creating is what is important -not necessarily the final product. I enjoy the purity found in cave paintings and seek to reconcile that world of man, which is still with us, with the sophisticated and complex way in which we live our lives today.
Another avenue is the idea of the space artist. His journal and his life are the tools available to him for the purposes of capturing and manipulating the heavens. Space is cold, distant, alien and hostile, and can be traversed only by robots or humanoid robots. Imagine if an artist, like a music conductor, could orchestrate his own orbiting symphony or wandering, then, we could see space, not as the metaphorical tomb or mausoleum blasting through the void to the next Earth, but as a sort of sea in which immerse ourselves. Imagine composing notes from the space artist to help reconcile the role that not just artists but, also normal people who enter space in the distant future, will have.
Art needs to be something that is personal and have the touch of the creator to it, contrary to the manufactured conceptual art, which is more like experimental theater than visual art. This is, of course, not the norm in today’s ironical type of installation art or overhyped shock art that only has value as far as getting attention like a child does when he/she cries. I am striving to make my work be something that can be differentiated from a cluttered storage parking lot or any other everyday site we all see. They cannot really be changed into art because some pseudo-artist says so and put into a gallery or museum, or convince some media mogul of their importance and enter the ranks of the blaringly garish world of American Idol style substance. I'm perfectly happy, like Nietzsche said, to be misunderstood in this life only to be that more important to other rare people over time. Only the rare understand the rare, the masses will just misuse and misunderstand as they largely do with Nietzsche and others work. Of course, it was easy for him to say that since he had the financial security of his pension as a retired professor. We all have to make compromises for our immediate living needs.
I like and respect Basquiat’s work. His “Hollywood Africans’ ring true with me…maybe because I'm in Hollywood, and I know a few Africans! But more deeply, the way he infuses his unconscious reflexes and conscious ideas into his work, to form a sort of random beauty, is admirable. Other artists that are important to me are of course Picasso, Duchamp, Modigliani, Rodin, Monet, Michelangelo, Phidias/Greeks, Hiroshige/Utamaro/Ukiyo-e artists and a few other contemporaries
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* None of the artworks may be copied or reproduced without the written permission of the Artist