Vanadu Art House by Clark Bedford
Junk Art House and Junk Art Cars
Born in 1947 in Greenwich Connecticut, Clarke Bedford entered Williams College in 1969 as a science major. He graduated an art major four years later, mostly having produced paintings and sculptures in the multidisciplinary, experimental atmosphere of the 1960s. After graduation, he moved between the country, New York City, and Boston, and his jobs included working for a small printing company, a textile designer, and administering polygraphs for a psychologist. His interest in assemblage sculpture, which was to become a lifelong obsession, emerged at this time, while he still continued to make realist and calligraphic-like abstract paintings.
After a friend’s suggestion, in 1977, he applied to an art conservation program in Cooperstown, New York. With his background in both the arts and sciences, he was accepted into the program, and there, as part of the conservation training, he learned photography. Mesmerized by the distinctive soft-focus warm-tone look of later 19th century photography, he was inspired to make stylistically similar photographs of often humorous subjects: light passing through monumental broccoli stalks, or small kewpie dolls that at first glance look like 19th-century topographical photographs of carved Egyptian monoliths. His interest in early photography is an outgrowth of his passion for objects and processes dating from about 1880 to 1920: “that exciting period: late Victorian, reform Victorian, the beginnings of Modernism, Arts and Crafts, English Arts and Crafts, Wiener Werkstätte, early Art Deco, Pre-Raphaelite….” After completing the conservation program in 1980, Bedford moved back to Baltimore (where his family had relocated in 1960). An internship at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC led to a 23-year art conservator position, during which he worked on Modernist sculptures as well as on paintings by Mondrian, DeKooning, Miro, Eakins, Homer, and numerous others.
While working full time and raising a family, Bedford continued
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