Seen and Reseen
Realist paintings by Bradley Stevens
Mark Jenkins
Nov 7, 2024
https://substack.com/home/post/p-151328287
Bradley Stevens, “North Beach Sunrise” (Courtesy of Zenith Gallery)
HE’S A SUCCESSFUL PAINTER OF COMMISSIONED PORTRAITS, but Bradley Stevens is probably best known to Zenith Gallery regulars for his pictures of museum interiors in which visitors and notable artworks are rendered with equal precision. (He came to this subject after spending five years as a copyist at the National Gallery of Art.) The Northern Virginia artist ventures outdoors — not for the first time, naturally — for his latest Zenith show, “Under Spacious Skies: The American Landscape.” The selection includes a few views of D.C. or the gentle terrain around his exurban home. Most of the pictures, however, portray grander West Coast topographies.
These dramatic vistas free Stevens’s hand ever so slightly. The oils are applied a bit more loosely when the subject is the Cascades or the High Sierras, although there’s also an appealing freedom to the profuse foliage in the foreground in Stevens’s gaze up the Potomac toward Georgetown. Thinned pigments denote the liquid qualities of water and clouds, and indicate the softening effects of distance.
The heavens are streaked with celestial gold in a painting of the Mall as seen from the Capitol, the one holdover from the artist’s previous Zenith show. The picture fits well into this grouping, as the skies are often as colorful as they are spacious. Often the astral light is reflected in a large body of water, a venerable gambit that energizes a scene while holding the composition together. Sky and water mirror each other, beckoning the eye up, down, and within.
