When a well-known artist holds a “retrospective” exhibition at a museum, it’s usually the artist looking back on the fullness of an entire career, its triumphs and all its waystations and landmarks. The exhibition “Bradford J. Salamon: Forging Ahead,” currently at the Hilbert Museum of California Art at Chapman University, is instead what could be called a mid-career show.
“Hence the name of the exhibition,” says the show’s curator, Gordon McClelland. “Bradford is still in the midst of a highly popular and successful career, and if anything, he’s forging onward, with a ton of new ideas and actively experimenting with new techniques.”
Salamon, a native of California, grew up in Huntington Beach immersed in the local surf culture and played drums in several punk rock bands. His father was an art dealer, so art was an important part of Bradford’s life since childhood.
Beginning his serious art studies in the late 1970s, by his mid-20s Salamon had embarked on a professional art career. During that time his art production focused on portraiture, which he sold through the two galleries he operated in Newport Beach.
Salamon’s exhibition includes a well-chosen selection of his portraits, still lifes, figural scenes, depictions of food (such as a giant In-n-Out “animal style” cheeseburger, which could be taken both as a metaphor for appetite and as a Pop Art commentary on the commercialization of food—or is a cheeseburger sometimes just a cheeseburger?) and whimsical images of vintage objects: toys, robots, clocks, paperback books, aspirin bottles. His signature style of oil painting employs what the artist calls “hard, soft and lost edges,” with the paint itself a signature player in the drama.
He lays paint on thickly, with texture created by impasto brushwork and palette-knife strokes and swatches, and with a dreamlike atmosphere arising from the misty edges, comb marks and transparent shadows. Images emerge from a remembered past: nostalgic figures of boyhood friends, the girls next door, the dad Bradford and his brothers visited on weekends—ghosts of days gone by, appearing in a mist of fond recollection.
But now the artist has embarked upon a new adventure, seen in public for the first time at the Hilbert Museum. Salamon has been working on an ongoing series of portraits he calls “Visages” for many years, but his latest “Visages” are the largest and most striking of his career so far. Instead of painting on canvas, he turned to drawing on paper, using draughting pencils or charcoal.
“I had injured my right hand,” he recalls, “and I wanted to use a medium I could easily apply with my left hand. So, drawings at a large scale, with soft pencils or charcoal, fit the bill.” The idea also arose from his sketchbooks. “The simple act of drawing on paper in my sketchbooks felt visceral and even therapeutic. All kinds of random thoughts and quotes were showing up in my sketchbooks. Various mental patterns from somewhere in my subconscious became a potpourri of doodles and scribbles. Small portraits, of no one in particular, filled some of the space.”
After a while, he says, those sketchbook pages started to feel like they were working in some strange kind of unison or orchestration. “I had an idea to transform what I was doing in the sketchbooks to a much larger scale. I bought several individual sheets of 30- x 22-inch Bristol vellum and decided to make them modular because the individual segments would reflect the sketchbooks. By putting these segments of vellum up against each other, I could then make any overall size I wanted.”
“Holly,” featured on the inside front cover of this issue, is one of these very large-scale “Visages.” The piece is now part of the Hilbert Collection and is planned to become a focal point in the visitor lobby of the expanded Hilbert Museum, scheduled to open in 2023. The drawing measures a majestic 95 x 84 inches and is constructed of multiple sheets of vellum paper laid out side by side on the wall.
The model for “Holly” was one of the children in the Salamon family’s new neighborhood when they moved to the San Gabriel Valley in 2009. “As my daughters Lauren and Sarah got a little older, they made friends with a few of the neighbors across the street,” he says. “Holly was one of the kids in the neighborhood who liked to come over and play with our chickens. One day Holly came over with her hair in a style that reminded me of Princess Leia. I found her to be a very beautiful, smart young lady. There’s an aura of mystery about her face and her eyes. I see this portrait of her as an interesting metaphor for youth, optimism and opportunity.”
Salamon is also doing live-art demonstrations at the Hilbert Museum on Saturdays through May 7, from noon to 2 pm, working in charcoal on a big “Visage” drawing of the late Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.
“Frida is an artist who has inspired so many people across the world,” Salamon says. “I picked her because she was a survivor in the face of incredible challenges—and she was still able to produce work that was raw and vulnerable. She’s still an icon for the Latinx community, the LGBTQ+ movement and feminists around the world.”
If Bradford Salamon’s art doesn’t fit neatly into one category, it can be said that it always retains a sense of joy and optimism, while also opening doors to all kinds of personal interpretations. “I hope when you look at the artworks you will find your own way of seeing them and interpreting their meaning,” the artist says. “This way you can bring whatever you want to the work and decide what it is for you.”
The Hilbert Museum of California Art is open Tues-Sat, 11 am to 5 pm, and is located at 167 North Atchison St., across from Ruby’s and the train station. Admission is free with an advance reservation (obtain online at tickets.Chapman.edu). Information: 714-516-5880, or visit www.HilbertMuseum.com.
