Once upon a time, before having her own exhibition there, Katherine Bradford used to walk past the Bowdoin College Museum of Art almost daily to get her groceries.

It was 1968, she had just married Peter Bradford, a promising young Yale Law School graduate hired to work in the administration of Gov. Ken Curtis.

“And he said how would you like to live in Maine for a year?” Bradford recalled.

She liked it a lot. Maine made her want to be an artist. But becoming an accomplished one happened almost accidentally, and not without a circuitous route in and out of marriage and back and forth from Brunswick to New York City and beyond.

While she had dabbled in art studying at Bryn Mawr and later earned an MFA, raising a family came first with the birth of twins. She lived in Brunswick until 1980 then decamped for New York City with the end of her marriage.

She traded time between the two locales about 50-50, painting canvasses in Brunswick in “an old barn next to my house. It makes a great summer studio.”

“It took quite a lot to change my life around so I could be an artist,” she said. “Luckily I kept the house on Mere Point Road. I rented it to Bowdoin College students during the academic year and came back each summer.”

In the process of bouncing between the two locales, the aesthetics of the Maine art community began rubbing off on Bradford — particularly the Skowhegan School, an intensive summer residency for visual artists established in 1946 — even as she became immersed in the New York art scene.

“I realized Maine had this incredible resource” in Skowhegan, she said. “You could go to lectures for free, hear artists talk about their work. Artists really got to know each other. It made a strong impression on me.”

She began exhibiting her work beginning in 1991, began teaching stints at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology in 1995, and earned a Guggenheim Fellowship and other prestigious awards. The Metropolitan Museum of Art now collects her work, as does Bowdoin and others.

Through everything, Bradford said she kept in touch with friends here and leans heavily on Maine’s environs for sustenance. It shows in her work. Critics often refer to her paintings as “ironic” or “whimsical,” bearing “odd humor” and “interior logic.”

In a review of a recent show at a New York gallery, art critic John Yau described Bradford’s paintings as “her own — they don’t look like anyone else’s.”

“There is an intelligence and sensitivity in what she does that can only be gotten by doing, and by remaining open to chance, impulsiveness and to the possibilities of what painting can teach you,” Yau wrote.

For “August,” on display at Bowdoin until Sept. 1, museum curator Joachim Homann “astounded me by selecting what he did,” Bradford said.

Homann selected “some big, some small, some risky … there’s this one of people diving into the water at night … I was impressed he was going to take some chances with work that was more experimental,” she said.

The result is a sort of homage to Bradford’s roots as a Brunswick artist: water-themed paintings fraught with boats and beach blankets.

And yet, “the ocean in Katherine Bradford’s recent paintings does not look like anything a beachgoer would recognize,” Homann writes in the exhibition program. “Bradford feels challenged by the seascapes by modernist Marsden Hartley and his counterpoint Andrew Wyeth, one rough-hewn and graphic, the other hyper-realistic and enigmatic. She takes cues from both.”

Across the hall, Bowdoin continues its exhibit of “Maurice Prendergast: By the Sea,” the seaside work of post-Impressionist painter Maurice Prendergast whose sophisticated and sensitive renderings of beaches, coves and bathers were often inspired by visits to Maine.

Museum officials say the happenstance is a friendly one, with a common coastal theme scene through different styles and eras.

That’s fine with Bradford, who noted that Prendergast “started out as an abstract painter, and those paintings have gradually become literal.”

“He painted seasides as they really were, crowded, with workingclass people wanting the day off,” which was a reaction to the idyllic beauty of Maine seasides depicted in Winslow Homer’s work.

As for her, Maine “was an extremely exciting place to be in the early ’70s, (with) lots of people moving here who wanted something different than city life.”

“I was excited. I’m still happy.”

bmentzinger@timesrecord.com

¦ “KATHERINE BRADFORD:
AUGUST”
Where: Bowdoin College Museum of
Art, through Sept. 1
Reception: 6 p.m., Friday, Aug. 9
Artist’s Gallery Talk: 7 p.m., Friday,
Aug. 9
Info: artmuseum@bowdoin.edu or
725-3275

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