Interview with Painter Brad Maxey

Any day I get the chance to talk with colleague Brad Maxey is a good day, so you can imagine my joy when he agreed to this interview. Maxey is a beloved teaching assistant at Platt College San Diego and has been increasingly recognized within the art community for his large-canvas paintings. When you’re standing before one of his paintings, you understand the appeal. You may at first notice the meticulous attention to detail, the Southern California lighting and landscape, and lovely reflections and shadows. But soon enough you’ll be so drawn into the scene Maxey has created that you’ll forget you’re looking at a painting.

Maxey’s paintings will be featured at the William D. Cannon Art Gallery, the 2015 Juried Biennial Exhibition, from December 14, 2014 through February 7, 2015.

Glass Sky

Maxey, Glass Sky

Q. How does it feel to have your paintings so well received?

It is very rewarding because the act of making them is so solitary and personal. When someone else looks at them and gets something from them it broadens the whole experience of creating them. It is a form of affirmation that others experience the world as I do sometimes.

Q. Where can people go to see your work?

I work with the gallery, Noel Baza, that just closed its doors. They are seeking different venues — pop up shows in various places and on January 9th at The History Center in Balboa Park. Some of my work will be there throughout the next year as part of the 100th Anniversary Celebrations of the 1915 Exposition. I am also currently in a juried show at The Carlsbad Cannon Gallery with two paintings — one I mention later here — Early Saturday Morning.

Q, What inspired or drove you to become an artist?

A certain curiosity about the world, the way things looked and felt that made me want to scribble and construct things as a child, and I never stopped.

 Q. Obviously place has had a big influence on your work. Can you talk about that?

In my current work, representation of place and time are everything! I think there is so much going on during our observations of our surroundings, our relationship to the world and the total of our minds, conscious and unconscious. Memories and surprises mix, and things tick out along the microseconds while we sense our surroundings. It is a fascinating process to me, one I’m not sure I even understand very much at all. But when I’m looking at something and feel it is very remarkable that urge to confirm what I am seeing is very strong.  My painting comes right out of that and painting is an interesting slow motion layered method of describing something or working to show what I have discovered. Much of the time it seems to show how much we see based on what we know or think we know about the world. The aspect of translating here and now into memory is a challenge. I love that challenge! Then on the other hand, maybe it’s just scribbling. Either way, things come into the process that are very exciting. Painting is very interesting.

Q. Who has influenced your work?
  • Edward Hopper,
  • Willem de Kooning,
  • Richard Diebenkorn,
  • David Hockney, and
  • James Doolin directly.
Q. Do you have a favorite painting?

Of my own? maybe one titled “Wires” completed about 3 years ago. A favorite by somebody else? Fredrick Church’s Twilight In the Wilderness, Vermeer’s Street in Delft, Willem de Kooning’s Mantauk Highway and North Atlantic, Richard Diebenkorn’s Cityscape (Landscape no 1), James Doolin’s East Wind — I can’t pick just one.

Wires

Maxey, Wires

 Q. What is the most challenging part of being a painter?

Getting up to speed while working. Even starting sometimes, much as I love painting can put me off. I really don’t like the bad days when I don’t feel capable and have to make myself work anyway.

 Q. What is the best part about working with acrylics?

Speed! I paint fast and I love the water-based mediums. I’m really messy and water is much friendlier as a solvent than turpentine or harsh thinners, and I just don’t have the patience to wait for oil paint to dry, nor do I like the scary potentially impermanent nature of watercolor or gouache, though I love working with them as well. Acrylic is tough. I like flatter, semi shiny surfaces now.

Maxey, Palm Springs Alley

Maxey, Palm Springs Alley

 Q. Has your style changed over the years?

Very much so. I was an abstract painter from art school until about 10 years ago and today very much a representational painter, a realist I suppose.

 Q. You’ve told me a little about some great teachers you’ve had. Can you talk about that?

My favorites were my junior high school teacher who got me started, Margaret Dubois and my primary painting instructor in art school, Bernard Martin, now retired from Virginia Commonwealth University. Both were very open minded and great guides pointing me in the directions I needed to go. They didn’t even show me very much of their own work to clarify things, and I learned my own lessons while working under them. They introduced me to the work of artists they thought might inspire and influence me. Bernard Martin introduced me to so many artists in his lectures. I loved those studio days in art school. There was this room where we sat and looked at slides. Martin would show you photography, sculptures, architecture and years ahead of today’s fixation, tattoos. I loved that man.

 Q. What are your habits, as a painter.

I have two afternoons of possibly four to five hours duration. That’s not the only time I have to work but it’s the most focused. I fold something into bread or fry two eggs, eat it and get to work. I stop after about two hours and make coffee. I work fast and focused but I also let myself get distracted to clear my head. I’ll run out and water a plant or check my phone for messages or go put on some different music just to reset my brain and my work habits. I find that pulling away tests my focus as well. Sometimes I attempt one of these jaunts away from the task and realize about 45 minutes later that I never did and I’ve got a brush in my mouth and a mess all over the place and then I laugh at myself for being a cliché artist. It’s funny because my work appears to be meticulous but my working methods are very often anything but.

 Q. What motivates you?

The desire to get at something that caught my attention to begin with and get it done before the connection to that inspiration fades.

Q. What inspires you?

Light and shadows on landscape and the particular ways any given subject strikes me as interesting or evocative.

Q. Can you describe your process and how you work?

I see things in my environment that excite me, and I may take a dozen photos of it then or later. Subjects that are familiar are best, the houses and trees and sky in the neighborhoods around my house or favorite places away from home that I visit with some frequency and have familiarity and multiple exposures to over time. I may or may not then do studies, quick things I call cartoons, basically acrylic, gouache or watercolor studies at about one sixth scale. I rarely buy pre-made grounds-canvas or wood boards but put together my own and finish them for painting. I grid off the canvas and draw the image up from the photos and studies, and I start painting by blocking in the forms and then by turns refine and refine the elements until they satisfy me — essentially become more and more directly readable as whatever it is I’m trying to represent. I do not paint like a photo realist. I am not painting my photos but using them to jog memories and for accuracy. I can’t be in the middle of the street doing this or outside, though I painted Plein air for many years. That’s another way of working. My methods are for the studio and in solitude though not usually with quiet. I like loud music. I know when I’m done for the day, sometimes abruptly, and I stop.

Early Saturday Morning, by Bradley Maxey

Maxey, Early Saturday Morning

 

Q. What are you working on now?

A large canvas with an image of the swimming pool early in the morning at a hotel I’ve stayed in for over 10 years in Palm Springs. I’ve been working from the photo on my iPad and a video I’ve had on my iPhone. It relates to one I did last year of a different pool at another hotel out there. I titled that earlier one Early Saturday Morning as an homage to Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning, because I love that painting with its raking light.

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