Bio
Born and raised in Michigan, the son of two artists, Thaddeus Radell completed his B.F.A. at University of Detroit/Mercy before moving to New York City to study at Parsons School of Design with Paul Resika, Leland Bell and Jack Heliker. After receiving his M.F.A. in 1982, he spent the next several years painting and working as the studio assistant to Resika, Robert Deniro, Sr. and the sculptor, Sydney Simon. In 1984, Radell moved to France, where he taught at the Lacoste School of Arts, and was studio assistant to renowned Canadian painter, Joseph Plaskett. He spent these next fourteen years dividing his time between his studios in Provence and Paris. He returning to New York City in 2000 where he spent the next 20 years before moving to Catskill. NY, where he now lives and works, commuting into the city as Professor of Painting at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. He has been a member of the Bowery Gallery, NY, since 2014.
Artist Statement
‘We are image-makers andimage-ridden.’ Phillip Guston
My work principallyconsists of profoundly abstracted figure compositions- intuitive constructionsthat begin with random marks establishing larger masses of torsos, heads andlimbs in an undefined setting. My process is almost punitively intuitive, supported by a Cezanne-ian will to build a picture through arigorous but tempered structure. The figures are born of their surrounding environment, emerging only partially and fugitively from the mat andscarred layers of pigment. A narrative is evident,but never overt and though the content has coalesced around certain literary texts, thesettings remain extremely vague- a beach, an interior, a wood. The paintingsare, in the end, meditations on the relationship between protagonists, real or fictional.
Work on the larger multiple figure compositions is accompanied with small invented studies of heads andself-portraits done from memory.
The paintings may be quite large, often eight, ten or twelve feet in width, and comprised of multiple panels. Or quite small, 6 x 8”. I use a cold wax medium combined with dry pigments, oil paint and embedded fragments of burlap. The surfaces eventually build up into a dense, rugged terrain, resembling scorched earth.