Quotes from Joe Bradley

I don't really get excited about good things happening to me.

You have the 20th century wrapping up and everything is moving at this breakneck speed? And then, painting is still walking. It's just a very human activity that takes time.

I'm not interested in popular culture, particularly. I'm not against it, I'm not avoiding it, but I'm not interested in it as a force in life.

I'm also interested in something that can happen later in life. In midstream, you can suddenly take what looks like a detour; I'm sure I've taken many detours.

Technology's always changing. There was a time where oil painting was a new technology. That changed painting.

Paintings exist in the present tense, yet somehow, because of how it's structured, it can move backwards through time as well.

People weep at music all the time, because music gives form to some abstract level of integration.

I think that time moves slower in painting. And maybe that accounts for a lot of the anxiety around painting in the last 40 or 50 years.

I love looking at sculpture, but there's some sort of spell that's broken with it.

I always like being surprised and sort of caught off guard by other people's work. So it doesn't cause me any anxiety to explore different avenues.

I suppose some people find their voice later than others, but it's interesting to look back at really early work to see that there's some kernel or a Rosetta Stone, in a way.

There's something retro about the pop culture references in the paintings, so I'd imagine it's not as much a pop culture reference as a pop art reference.

There's art that I think is pretty silly, but it doesn't get under my skin like it used to.

Money issue looms so large in art now. And it has absolutely nothing to do with art.

I can only think of a handful of artists that can make a funny painting or a funny sculpture without it feeling coined in someway.

It's a funny semantic turn - when someone paints a landscape, no one says they "borrowed" it, only that they painted it.