About Brad
My Story
I work from my studio on Spruce Head Island in South Thomaston, Maine, where I live with my wife, Charlotte, our three children, and two dogs. While we only moved here a few years ago, the Midcoast feels like home in ways that I have not experienced elsewhere, and the landscape has inspired much of the art that you’ll find here.
My art is often created from found wood, fiberglass, metal, and other materials washed up on the shoreline, each element alive with its own history and stories. Yet the work is grounded in influences that stretch back several decades. In college, I majored in studio art, art history, and religious studies, receiving my degree from Brown University and cross registering classes at the Rhode Island School of Design. After graduating, I spent two years on a fellowship to study traditional Tibetan thang-ka painting, living among Tibetan communities in Nepal and India. I then returned to the US to earn a Master in Fine Arts degree from the University of Pennsylvania, studying with the Maine painter Neil Welliver and Hitoshi Nakazato, a renowned printmaker. Neil would often talk about Maine as inspiring his creative process, but it took 30 years for me to discover what he meant.
In the early 1990’s, I began to exhibit my work nationally while pursuing a teaching career. After a decade in the classroom, I accepted a Director of Education position in a major museum in New York City. While there, I met a couple who were starting a school in Bali, Indonesia. Two months later, my family and I moved to the Balinese jungle where I served as the school’s founding director, hiring all the staff and overseeing the construction of over 40 buildings made from bamboo and other sustainable materials. This experience led to a series of head of school positions in New York, Maine, and New Hampshire. While this career was deeply fulfilling, it allowed only occasional hours in the studio. It wasn’t until we reached Spruce Head in 2021 that I was able to focus on creating painting and sculpture again. I am also a member of the RSU 13 Board of Directors, representing South Thomaston, am involved with the Commission for International Education for the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC), recently joined the Board of the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA), and serve as a consultant for a small number of domestic and international schools.
Balancing creative pursuits and family life with these different interests while engaging deeply with my community can be challenging, but I have found maintaining an active civic and intellectual life provides important perspectives in the studio. I am always learning, connecting dots between influences, and thinking expansively to arrive at creative solutions. Each commitment and practice informs the next in much the same way that a certain section of a painting influences another, enhancing the work’s overall impact, all while providing discoveries and insights along the way.
For more information or prices of the artwork on this site, contact me at brad.choyt.art@gmail.com.
Artist Statement
Over the last 30 years, my art has evolved from exploring the narratives and symbolism of traditional Tibetan painting to my current work, derived from organic patterns and geometric shapes found when the natural world collides with the human. Now, when I walk Maine's rocky coast or along the bank of a forest stream, I search for relationships between the forms, colors, and textures created when stones, water, trees, and other organic elements intersect with remnants of human activity such as abandoned boats, scraps of painted wood, rusted machinery—forgotten materials often cracked and pitted by wind, ocean, and time.
There's an ambiguity of reference and association that leads observers down a variety of paths. People might look at a painting and imagine they are walking through a canyon, beside a weathered barn, through a marine salvage yard, or past a stone house built into a cliff. They might be struck by a relationship between two disparate materials or surfaces that somehow have grown into each other, enhancing their overall beauty. They might notice a texture or color that seems to have aged just right, as if the original maker of the material (if there ever was one) has anticipated its gain in authenticity over the decades. This body of work, then, is about reinterpreting landscape and natural surroundings with a range of tools and vocabularies to better understand how we look at the world, perceive its beauties, and form a new, heightened relationship to it.
To meet this challenge, I’ve woven together aspects of several artistic genres. Painting has pulled me toward layers of color and value with their wide expressive and emotional possibilities. Sculpture, with its emphasis on form and texture, has played an integral role in the composition and repetition of patterns I’ve explored. Architecture, especially vernacular architecture that incorporates responses to local climates and terrains, has been critical in helping me think about the way design is inherent in choices as particular as the implements used to construct and as complicated as where to position a structure to optimize its function and beauty.
These influences, in turn, have led me toward specific materials, techniques, and subjects: I have been working with wood for the last 30 years and only grown in my respect for its receptivity to different kinds of treatment. Pieces of metal and fiberglass that I've collected from the coastlines of Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts are selected for their color, texture, and shape. I have also used ceramic, rice paper, stone, glass, plaster and other materials to explore a wider variety of visual effects. Once the pieces are assembled, I add color combinations of acrylic, encaustic, and layers of oil paint to build both undertones and opaque colors with each form. As the pieces materialize, I often carve into the surfaces and reapply paint in an iterative process, reworking the surface until the relationship between each section of the form develops cohesion.
These pieces, which are either abstract designs or landscapes, frame a way of thinking about natural environments, aerial views, as well as irregular terrains such as coastlines that existed well before human habitation but whose existence is now deeply affected by our activities, careful or negligent as they may be. I have also attempted to achieve a suggestion of motion in the shapes beyond their borders, a sense that there’s a consequence to all this activity.
It’s my hope that as you look at my work, you think of your own experiences of patternings, cycles, and habitats as they affect you, our communities, and environments both physical and otherwise. In doing so, it may be possible to see just how much we’re responsible for sculpting the reality that surrounds us, the perceptions and the materials that form our experiences in the world.
Education
University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Fine Arts, 1990-1993. Master of Fine Arts degree with majors in painting, printmaking, and sculpture.
Training with master artists in traditional Tibetan Thang-ka Painting, 1988-1990. Kathmandu, Nepal and Dharamsala, India.
Brown University, 1984-1986; 1987-1988. Graduated magna cum laude in Studio Art, Religious Studies, and Art History. Honors theses in Studio Art and in Religious Studies. Cross-registered and completed course work at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Junior Year Abroad, 1986-1987. Summer courses and fall semester: the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel.
Spring semester: the School for International Training (World Learning), College Semester Abroad, Kathmandu, Nepal and Dharamsala, India.