JOHN ROBERT BRADLEY
LANDSCAPES AND DREAMSCAPES
At the Niagara Gallery
1948 Hwy. 20 at Hwy. 406
May 7 to May 25 2007
meet the artist Saturday May 19th from 3-6
I felt very alone sitting there in my partner’s kitchen in March of 1998. She and her son had departed to Florida for their annual vacation a week or so previous. I had promised not to drink in her home after admitting I had a problem with alcohol a few weeks ago. My life seemed filled with sadness, one step forward and two steps back, a continuous slide back into a deep and dark pit where booze seemed my only recourse even though I knew it was temporary. I began drinking right after they left. Continuously it seemed….
It was 9:30am of March 22 and I’d just polished off a six-pack of beer. My despondency grew deeper as did my breathing. It became shallow and very, very slow. Like my body was shutting down. No will to continue living in this manner. I felt my eyelids start fluttering…like they had a mind of their own, and I couldn’t stop them from shutting. At that point I really didn’t care and so let the approaching darkness come…my safe place, pain free, my own oblivion.
Instead of the comforting blackness though the peace of sleep or what passed for sleep for me….I saw a tiny pinpoint of light ahead. Suddenly, unexpectedly it silently exploded into a shimmering brightness, like a living curtain of all colours at once, but yet white to my eyes. A living organism of awe-inspiring acceptance. Comforting. Peaceful. I had a sense of knowing that where I was I did not have my physical body with me…just “me”…the “soul me”. And somehow I knew this curtain of brilliant and living white light was but the curtain I had only to pass through to my Creator on the other side and that would be it for me this lifetime.
My ex-wife had passed away a few months before, apparently from alcohol and pills. Possibly suicide, but very tragic and that thought suddenly came to my mind. I remember the words “a choice” and “work to be done”…not sure if they were my own or from a Divine source but not being ready to proceed through that curtain. When the though came and registered, a “pull”, a feeling of going backwards and awaking on the floor of the kitchen. The idea of wanting to make a change, that I had received a huge “tap on the shoulder” from God…..
Thus began the spiritual journey of a prodigal son of Niagara Falls, who “ran away from home” at age 18 to live life without the strict religious upbringing he knew as a child and longed to escape from for years before his chance came with a move to Ottawa in 1971. John’s journey took him into a life that he thought he wanted. Marriage at 21 to his first sweetheart, interesting jobs and travel to western Canada. The love of art he had experienced as a young boy and then a teenager at Stamford Collegiate was placed on the backburner of life as he made his way in the world. Any pain he felt at not drawing or painting on a regular basis could easily be removed with a few beers, some extra time at work, material ambitions and the like. There just didn’t seem to be enough women, wine or gold to satisfy his yearnings.
Life’s journeys took John across many miles…different countries and cultures. From the highlands of Scotland to the lush hills above Quebec City. He rode camels in the shadow of the pyramids at Giza, explored the cisterns below the city of Istanbul, walked the streets where the Templars held court on the island of Rhodes, and gazed in wonder at the ceiling that Michelangelo painted in the Sistine Chapel. A rich life but still with a huge hole in his heart-of-hearts. The emptiness that only a gift from the Universe could fill.
And so, it came to be, with the help of a loving partner John returned to school to study art at the Ontario College of Art and Design. They had both had had a unique and visionary dream the same night, after the near death experience in 1998….she in Toronto at home and he in Guelph at a treatment center and in it he was in an art class at a school. John started to experience kundalini related energies in his body and was receiving artistic inspirations in dreams on a regular basis. It only felt right and good to paint the messages coming through….the bright colours and mystical meanings of the nightly journey in what Norval Morrisseau calls the Land of Invention. Even John’s thesis was related to his personal journey…”Inspired Creativity in Mystic Artists”.
Sadly they did part ways after his graduation but remain the best of friends…he a mystic artist now on a journey of healing and teaching, she a pioneering and visionary medical doctor continuing to bridge the gap between spirituality and medicine. The desire for material success has been replaced with a calm and peaceful acceptance of himself as an artist, bringing his own vision to the world around him and to the world within. John even created and teaches a course called “Dreams and Symbology”:Teaching and Healing. And so, as an artist, finally and foremost in life he returns to his childhood home, Niagara Falls, sharing his vision of the physical the imaginary world with us all.
