"The vivid, mostly primary, colours are intended to have a life-affirming effect on the viewer, perhaps with the sense of having a revelatory vision, a mild migraine or recovering from a hangover."

I am now what is generally known as a new wave wang-eyed pop folk artist. 

Although I'm now considerably older than John Lennon was when he died, and Dino Zoff when he collected a World Cup winner's medal, I like to think of myself as an emerging artist. I'm just emerging in slow motion. In my twenties I lived for a while in Venezuela and was heavily influenced by rural folk art. Other influences include Egyptian funerary portraits, Holy well decorations, African barbershop signs, religious icons, surf T-shirts, old football cards, crap signs, those blue photos you get in old shop windows.

A lot of my work involves fruitless searches for things that are lost, be they people, underground rivers, stories, buildings or ways of life. Regular motifs include the connecting and merging of maps, old photographs and whiskey-based visions. The beauty of the the mundane. The epiphanies - I call them "Zen Newsflashes" - that are close to home. This is partly due to a desire to make sacred the familiar and also because I am a lazy shite. The vivid, mostly primary, colours are intended to have a life-affirming effect on the viewer, perhaps with the sense of having a revelatory vision, a mild migraine or recovering from a hangover.

Video - (A Bit Like) Pictures At An Exhibition

Bathsheba Everdene from Tim Bradford on Vimeo.

In my first year of secondary school the music teacher attempted to get us, a gaggle of jabbery and unruly 11 year olds, interested in classical music. It seemed like a hopeless task. But the music he picked - Pictures at An Exhibition by Modest Mussorgski - was intriguing and I've loved it ever since. Recently I've been inspired to do the same for some of my own paintings, albeit from a slightly more crappy out-of-tune-voiced pop-punk perspective than Mussorgski. The latest one I've recorded (had a quiet morning yesterday) is 'Bathsheba Everdene' - the painting that it accompanies is here.