Page 73 - WTP Vol. VII #6

Jen Bradley had no way of knowing when she started at Massachu- setts College of Art and Design that it would end with not only her BFA, but a lifelong art practice called The Ape Drawing Project. Everything changed in 1994, her last year, when Bradley visited the Franklin Park Zoo to observe and record primate behavior for her biological anthropology class. She found the most intuitive way for her to do that was by drawing. Bradley quickly realized that her time spent with the gorillas was the cross-disciplinary influence her art was missing. It made sense she’d find it in science; her father was a biol- ogy professor, and her mother, a nurse, had her daughter bring pond water home to put on slides under a microscope, so they could view another world.
Bradley, a Boston native, is the Artist in Residence at Zoo New Eng- land, which runs the Franklin Park Zoo. She was keynote speaker for the National Scholastic Art Awards, fellow at the St. Botolph Club, and has been awarded many residencies. Her work has been exhib- ited at Boston University and Walker Contemporary, MA, among others, and she is represented by The Schoolhouse Gallery in Prov- incetown, RI. Bradley was also included in the exhibition Painting by Primates, the lone human to show her work alongside paintings by Western Lowland gorillas Okie and Joe, from the Franklin Park Zoo. Thousands of people walked through the show, exhibited at the zoo’s Tropical Forest in 2007.
For her expressionist paintings, Bradley takes the drawings back to her studio to use as reference. She paints on large canvases, building layer upon layer of line and texture with different materials, balancing thick oil paint and glaze. All of Bradley’s observations, and the emo- tions that they bring out, become part of her paintings, which are included in various public and private collections worldwide.
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