Katherine Bradford

When this Brooklyn-based artist began populating her colorful abstract canvases with figures, she became a late-in-life art-world success story.

- Julie L . Belcove

In art lingo, the terms emerging artist and young artist are often used interchangeably. So when the New York gallery Canada, known for identifying fresh talent, mounted a show last year featuring moody canvases of swimmers awash in luminous purples and blues and heavily indebted to abstraction, more than a few onlookers were startled to learn that the break through works were painted by a 73-year-old grandmother.

But then Katherine Bradford, their gray-haired—with a shock of hot pink—creator, has never adhered to a traditional time line. She didn’t pick up her first paintbrush until she was a wife and mother living in Maine, where she’d moved with her young family in 1969 and fell in with a group of artists. “The way they lived their lives and questioned the system appealed to me so much,” she says in her Williamsburg, Brooklyn, studio. “It finally clicked with me that being an artist was a way of going through life, a whole worldview. I could relate to that.”