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| Carving
a mountain dulcimer peghead in 1985 |
Featured
Artist -
Bradley W. Schenck
Bradley
was born in California but he's recently been caught up in an eastbound
migration that's finally landed him in northeastern Ohio.
His intimidating last name is originally Dutch.
His ancestors settled in New England when it was still New Holland,
and they were mad enough about the name change that they fought
a war against the English a few years later.
It may be because of his two Irish American
grandmothers that he wandered into Celtic art; already working as
an artist by 1979, he ran across a copy of George Bain's Celtic
Art: The Methods of Construction
and began to explore traditional and Celtic Revival styles in his
own work. At that time, this was all in ink and watercolor.
While Bain was seminal, Bradley gives perhaps
even more credit to John G. Merne's A
Handbook of Celtic Ornament
in forming his own take on Celtic design. Merne's Celtic Revival
style adopts some features of the Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts
movements in a very natural way and the nature of that (brief) book
is less inclined to mathematical diagrams, and more to giving an
artist ideas about how to fill spaces with original knotwork.
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And
in 2005, after 20 mostly digital years
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But ask him who his favorite artist is, in the Celtic vein,
and he'll sit you down and tell you about the little-published Art
O'Murnaghan ( Brian Kells), who worked on a modern day illuminated
manuscript in the early 20th century and whose work, housed now in
the National Museum of Ireland, seems to make Bradley glow. He hopes
to see it first hand one day.
Bradley's had a varied career, as many creative
people do, with jobs as a draftsman and sign painter, at a retail
window design company, and then seventeen years in the computer games
industry as an artist, game designer, and art director.
Today, he says, he lives by his wits. This seems
to involve selling his own work online and the occasional freelance
commission.
Visitors to this site may also be interested in Bradley's book of Celtic knotwork designs for artists and craftspeople - Celtic Knotwork Borders in Repeating Sections.
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