ABOUT JEANETTE BRADLEY
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Jeanette Bradley has been an urban planner, an apprentice pastry chef, and the artist-in-residence for a traveling art museum on a train. Her picture book LOVE, MAMA contains no cities, pastries, or trains, but was made with lots of love. Jeanette is the Southern New England Illustration Coordinator for SCBWI (CT & RI). She currently lives in Rhode Island with her wife and kids.
Jeanette is represented by Emily Mitchell of Wernick & Pratt.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Picture books are meant to be read aloud – to be, in a way, a performance on a very intimate stage. When creating with words or pictures, I am always thinking about the interaction of three art forms: visual art, literature and theatre.
I work digitally but want my work to feel fresh, spontaneous, and organic. I want the viewer to have a sense of the human hand that went into the mark making on the virtual page. I work to create characters and stories that express the great diversity of human experience as well as universal themes.
Two of my favorite books as a child were Mary Blair’s The Color Kittens and Frog and Toad are Friends by Arnold Lobel. I still love these books as an adult and re-read them often. My work has been influenced by Mary Blair’s exuberant use of color and Arnold Lobel’s insight into the emotional lives of children.
