Bruce Watford - Artist 

I'm a fine artist based in Birmingham, Alabama.

    I’ve always been an artist. At 12, I convinced my mother to let me take private art lessons. I continued with these until I left for college, primarily focusing on creating photorealistic renderings.
   Around 1983, the Birmingham Museum of Art acquired a painting by Ed Paschke titled Le Sac. From the first time I saw it, I wanted to paint like Paschke. By the time I graduated college in 1987, I was capable of doing that.
   During college, I discovered several other artists, including Robert Longo. He became one of my favorites, along with Paschke. After I graduated, I worked in two different but related styles that were influenced by these two artists. These pieces featured areas that were photo-realistically rendered.
   Over time, I grew tired of spending 25 to 40+ hours rendering an image. I began to experiment in several completely different styles, each influenced by a different artist or group of artists. None of these styles required rendering.
   During this time, Photoshop was gaining popularity. My decline in rendering coincided with the rise of Photoshop.
   Around 2012, I created several pieces in a style I called “Symbols of Power”. These were a throwback to the pieces I created immediately after college and are a combination of photorealistically-rendered Robert Longo-inspired businessmen and primitive petroglyph symbols.
   In 2016, I started using Photoshop to digitally create pieces similar to the paintings of Ed Paschke. I layer glitch textures onto photos of faces, adjusting layer styles and adding and subtracting textures. Using Photoshop, I am able to quickly try different effects until I am happy with the result. This allows for a lot of experimentation. I call this style “Cyber”. I also created a related style called “Glitchmen”. In it, I combine the glitch patterns with the businessmen like those in Longo’s “Men in the Cities” drawings. In both styles, I represent the isolation, loneliness, and loss of identity of people disappearing into the contemporary cyberspace culture.
   From 1988 to 2000, I belonged to an art group in Gadsden called the New Age Art Alliance. I exhibited in their annual shows at the Gadsden Museum of Art. The museum owns two of my pieces from 1992.
   I exhibited in the Magic City Art Connection show in 2010 and Artwalk in 2010 and 2017. In 2013, I exhibited in the Birmingham Art Association show. My piece “Symbols of Power 6” won first place in the drawing category.