Bradley Lusa

As I grew older, I got involved in sports and other childhood group activities, but I didn’t stop drawing and making art. Looking back now, I suspect it was a sort of refuge for me. A way for me to manage the extreme highs and overwhelming lows that I routinely experienced in my somewhat chaotic brain. I didn’t let others know of my interest in art very often. Instead, I primarily kept it to myself. My parents, of course, knew that I was still very interested in drawing. However, since I was no longer throwing daily temper tantrums, they no longer felt the need to encourage me to do so. When I first went to college out of high school, I took a Life Drawing class as an elective. Many years later, when I went back to college, I took another art class as an elective. And then, several years after this, I started an art class at my local parks and recreation center. However, I stopped going after a handful of classes because it interfered with my latest obsession at the time which was learning how to play beach volleyball. For all practical purposes, these classes makeup the extent of my formal art education. Then, for twenty-five years, I did not pick-up a pencil and put it to paper with the intention of doing a drawing. Life, making a living, other interests and a fear that I could not draw anymore kept me from crawling under my bed to get out my pencil box and sketch pads. That is, until late in 2020 when I had a flare-up of a chronic back condition which kept me off work for 3 weeks. When this condition rears its ugly head, I cannot stand or walk for more than about minute before the pain is so excruciating that I have no choice but to sit down. So, finally, I no longer had an excuse for not drawing. I then proceeded to do a drawing of the one and only plant I had in my apt. This quickly led me to doing what I had wanted to try for decades: to learn how to paint. Now, almost three years later, I have completed just under seventy paintings. For the time being, I have settled upon using acrylic on hardboard panels. I have painted a variety of subject matters ( still lifes, landscapes, nature paintings, florals, interiors, figures and portraits) which I think is important and necessary for someone just starting out like myself. I have received feedback that although my paintings are primitive and naïve, my style is unique and distinctive. I, of course, appreciate and relish any and all positive feedback, even if it is possibly a backhanded compliment. However, I wish someone could tell me what my style is as I still don’t see that I have a style. Maybe this is true for most artists, that one cannot actually see their own style of painting. Nevertheless, that painting has come into my life, I see as a true blessing and I extremely grateful for it. I am obsessed with it, with getting better at it, with trying new subject matters, new “styles”. That is not to say that it doesn’t cause me angst and anxiety and self-doubt because it does, constantly. But, the benefits far outweigh any downside. Viva the Arts in general, and painting in particular!