JEN BRADLEY is a Boston-born painter and printmaker whose work moves between representation and abstraction through layered surfaces and expressive mark-making. She received her BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and has developed a visual language that combines drawing, oil and encaustic paint, transparent glazes, and screen-printing. Her paintings range in scale from intimate 5” x 5” works to canvases measuring over 124” x 124”. Bradley’s process is rooted in the physical qualities of paint and drawing. Light, interior spaces, and architectural fragments recur throughout her work, creating environments that feel both observed and remembered. Working in long-term series that evolve over many years, her paintings combine gestural mark making, layered paint surfaces, and atmospheric spaces that suggest both physical environments and emotional states. For more than three decades, Bradley has maintained an ongoing drawing practice centered on the Western Lowland Gorillas at Zoo New England’s Franklin Park Zoo in Boston. Beginning in 1994, she made routine visits to the zoo to draw the gorillas directly from life, often spending entire days working in front of the habitat with large sheets of paper and charcoal. What began as a curiosity about apes, animal behavior, and observational drawing evolved into a long-term body of work known as The Ape Drawing Project — a practice grounded in attention, repetition, and sustained observation. Animals occupy an important place in Bradley’s work and imagination. She is interested in how animals appear throughout mythology, religion, science, and everyday human experience, and how they reflect human emotion, vulnerability, and social behavior. These ideas continue to inform paintings that move between the human and animal worlds, abstraction and figuration, intimacy and distance. Bradley’s work is held in public and private collections and has been exhibited at galleries and institutions including Boston University and Arnot Art Museum. She frequently gives artist talks and visiting artist presentations centered on The Ape Drawing Project, serves as Artist-in-Residence at Zoo New England, and is a former fellow at The St. Botolph Club. Since 2001, Bradley has been represented by Schoolhouse Gallery. She divides her time between Maine and Provincetown, while continuing her regular practice of working on site at Franklin Park Zoo in Boston.