Bradley
W. Schenck 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 called New Holland, and they remained
mad enough about the name change that they fought a war against
the English a hundred and forty 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.
 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.
Also
on the web:
|
