You have worked on aluminum; tell me about your aluminum paintings.
My experience with painting on aluminum had always been these slick manufactured looking things so I wanted to ultimately create something that was gratifying to me as a painting, rather than a sort of manufactured product on aluminum. So these, I guess expose, you to a way more painterly kind of esthetic than I was used to seeing on this really slick manufactured surface.
What’s your inspiration for your colour?
It’s definitely not arbitrary - you can see by walking around that I do use a lot of the same colours in most of my paintings, so I have a quiver of colours that I like to use and I arrive at them through experimentation. I’ve been making paintings for twelve years now and they’re just the sort of colours I gravitate to. Some of them I use because of their viscosity ability to be luminous when different colours are underneath them, and some of them are just really nice punchy colours that stand out on anything.
What’s the time frame between the one with the horizontal strips and the more organic one?
They were done simultaneously so this one had been an exercise in using all of the same elements, all of the same colours to create two extremely different paintings. They are still related to one another in their genesis, in everything that put them together and they became this really beautiful contradiction in terms of how I used to paint and how I now paint. There’s always a combination of the two of those within the new paintings, so this was a jumping off point.
Your paintings seem very balanced almost in a classical sense, do you feel that?
It’s not something that I ultimately strive for, but it’s something that just happens within. The great thing about painting is that it’s not a preconceived notion of a final product.
It’s were it takes you along the way and it just seems that these ones take me to this place of balance within them.
Can you tell me about some of your latest works?
They are the newest incarnation of this loosening, a little bit of a combination of the two because they do have this all over composition, they do have this expansive space, they look like they could go on forever and they also have a surface space. They go back and forward, as well as they expand…
One of the major points in terms of what I’m doing is that a lot of it looks very digital. It’s about a certain notion of perfection, however it’s the opposite of that, because they’re all hand painted. It’s not a perfect grit, there are wobbles and wavers, and I’m very mindful of striving to be perfect, but I really pay attention to the process of imperfection because I think we live in such a controlled era. We are sort of in the cult of the screen right now, so the hand-made has taken a back seat to it - a well crafted painting versus a computer printout.

Bradley Harms
Running until October 18th
Newzones Gallery of Contemporary Art
730 – 11th Ave SW, Calgary