Artist Bio

Michelle Bradford is a contemporary abstract oil painter based in New Haven, CT. She is best known for her free-flowing, ethereal oil paintings which use color and organic forms to create abstracted scenes inspired by nature.

From an early age, Michelle found that art was the easiest way for her to express herself and the thing she loved to do more than anything else. In high school she received an arts scholarship to attend the Marie Walsh Sharpe Arts Foundation in Colorado Springs. Michelle went on to earn her BFA at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, where her focus and passion at the time was representational art, primarily portraiture. After graduating, she spent seven years working for a video game company where she created 3-D character models. She moved on to launch her own business as a commissioned portrait artist, which she enjoyed for nearly ten years. In 2013, Michelle describes what she experienced as a profound internal shift. “Suddenly portraiture felt tedious, and I had an undeniable urge to express myself freely through color.” This she describes as the beginning of her life as an abstract painter.

Essential to Michelle’s abstract painting process is taking the time for inward reflection and meditation to open the flow of creative inspiration. Michelle explains, “Color is always at the forefront, but I fall in love with the organic shapes and textures that appear along the way. There is a back and forth between times of free-flowing paint and periods of deliberate embellishment into the areas that interest me. Each time it is a deep dive into my inner world, where I connect with my soul and feel at one with the universe, with the earth, and with all of life. It is my greatest desire with all that I create and put out into the world, to express the beauty of that in some way so that it may be shared with and felt by the viewer.”

Michelle is a full-time artist from her home in Connecticut, where she lives with her husband, two daughters and their beloved cats.