Since she first picked up a paint brush at fourteen years old, Jane Bradley has reveled in color. Simple line drawings of people and horses now took on shades of meaning and emotion. To this day, color animates her richly-hued canvases.

Second only to color is her love of rendering the human form. “There is a whole world to be discovered in a face, in a gesture, in the subtle turn of a hand,” she says. “This is my frontier, something for which I never get tired of exploring. My enthusiasm spills over into my teaching and I try to bring people along on this adventure.”

Jane received her MFA at the University of Utah in painting and Computer Animation in 1991. The twelve years that followed were devoted to her work as a computer animator and eventually as an Art Director for major console and computer game companies. Although she occasionally had done portraits, for the most part her painting had been set aside for her career in computer graphics. Then, in 2004, she decided to return to painting full time.

“It was a difficult new beginning,” she recalls. “It took me six months to get my skills back, and then I had to decide what direction I would head with my painting.” Having recently relocated to Arizona, it was only natural for her to seek inspiration in the people and the places of the West. Her work combines both realistic and romantic visions of the West: the cowboy, the native tribes of the Southwest, the pioneers, the mountain men, the horses. Inspired by Frederick Remington's energy and immediacy, but also by Edward Hopper's empathy for the individual she distinguishes her paintings from the more documentary work of genre painters.

Jane’s work has been featured in many shows, both regional and national, including The Empire Ranch Show, The Phippen Museum Western Art Show, the Southwest Show in Indio, the CM Russell Show and, most recently, the Scottsdale Salon Show at the Legacy. In 2006 her painting “Red Shoes” won Best of Show and First Place in Oil at the Phippen Western Art Show and was featured in Southwest Art magazine.

"Western art can also be fine art," she explains. "It can communicate something personal to us even if we never ourselves ride on horseback across the desert or dance the dance of our ancestors. Art can forge a bond of empathy between strangers. I want my work to do precisely that."