Jeremy Bradshaw
Jeremy Bradshaw creates art to share happiness. He has spent his entire life as close to wilderness and wildlife as possible and happiness is the overwhelming emotion that a life of exploration has gifted him with. Bradshaw began sculpting recently, at the age of 43 in 2017. He is self-taught. His art is born of the ambition to “represent the animal subject accurately and give them just a lifted, joyful expression.” We will gladly share that he has succeeded in doing just that. People smile when they look at a Bradshaw sculpture. Great art elicits emotions. Our world has given us few better emotions than happiness.
Success has come quickly for Bradshaw. His sculptures have already been exhibited at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, the Briscoe Western Art Museum, the Brookgreen Gardens, the National Wildlife Museum and in more prestigious public venues. In 2019, only a year after his acceptance into the exclusive Society of Animal Artists, Bradshaw’s sculpture “Splittin’ Hare” received the President’s Award for 3-D art. 2021 saw him win the Marilyn Newmark Memorial Grant from the National Sculpture Society. In presenting the award for Bradshaw’s outstanding ability in his body of work, fellow sculptor Roger Martin said, “Jeremy Bradshaw has cultivated an in-depth understanding of animal anatomy. He is comfortable enough with this knowledge to successfully manipulate it and use it to create mood and motion. Jeremy’s animals have life – they enable the viewer to create their own story.” In 2022 Bradshaw won The Anna Hyatt Huntington Award and a Brookgreen Medal for his piece “Red Queen.”
Most of Bradshaw’s hands-on experience with wildlife came from his fascinating work as a falconer. He has been training various raptors for thirty years and wrote a popular falconry book specifically about working with merlins. Prior to sculpting, Bradshaw had a job flying trained falcons to keep pest birds out of organic blueberries and wine grapes during the harvest season and ran a small business selling hand stitched leather falcon hoods to falconers around the world. His passion for working with raptors drives his discerning curiosity and acute observation skills, skills that come in awfully handy in the beautiful wildlife pieces he sculpts. Bradshaw had always been artistically inclined but did not spend any significant time making any art prior to jumping all in on his art career. The world is grateful he made the leap. He says, “I aspire to bring my sculptures to life so they reflect an artist's life authentically committed to the natural world.”
