There can be little doubt that artists like Bradley, Adelman, and other are at the forefront of a cultural movement that embraces the use of what were once thought of as esoteric techniques for enhancing their creative lives. Yet Bradley thinks they are part of something even bigger.
"I think there's a neo-spiritual art movement happening," (Bradley) says. "At a certain point the truth is a bigger subject than pop culture. With meditation, you find your inner peace, your inner truth, your centered truth, and then you find the world, and the world finds its center. That's a noble pursuit for art these days."
Up close, the stillness dissolves, or is troubled: the painting consists of thousands of small hatch marks, short vertical stokes made in horizontal bands, applied in what the artist has described as a kind of meditative gesture. The experience I had viewing it was something like love, what the French call a coup de foudre, a thunderbolt, and I knew I wanted to feel its effect again and again; I knew that it was something that would be, in some way I didn't fully understand, useful to me. And so, thanks to haggling, a drawn-out schedule of payments generously accepted by the gallery, and the forbearance of my partner, it now hangs behind my desk, where I can feel it almost buzzing as I work.
