Beginnings
Bradley was born in Moab, Utah, and raised about a hundred yards from bronze sculptor Gary Prazen's foundry. He spent hours there with clay and anatomy charts, and a year as an apprentice making pewter belt buckles for the local mines. He watched Prazen's bronze of John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn — bought by Wayne himself three weeks before his death — go from $2,500 to $25,000 overnight.
Digital cameras brought the interest back. In 2018, single, with the children grown and a career in transition, he picked up a Canon, an iPhone, and an old light kit and started working with lights, mirrors, color, UV filters, and props. What he found was that he was a very good photographer, and even more an excellent editor. Through late 2019 and early 2020 he photographed in and around Las Vegas. When COVID cleared the calendar, the reflection work ran from sunrise to sunset.
A career in risk and quality had already given that instinct a system, through Dr. W. Edwards Deming's Total Quality Management. The same discipline now governs the art: edition integrity, certificates, the collector registry.
Process
Bradley developed the Intelligent Mirror Process in 2019 and 2020, working from his own photographs. The original image is duplicated above, below, right, or left, so one photograph becomes many and the eye has to decide what is real. In October 2021, at a Mesquite Fine Arts Photographic Society meeting, he was asked what he called the work. He had the answer. That is when he coined the name Intelligent Mirror Process.
“It’s almost like an amusement park with the mirror room, as the mind has to really work its intelligence to decipher what is real and what is an illusion.”
Recognition
Recognitions, awards, and previous articles are available upon request. Ask Bradley.
Community
Bradley is a member of the Virgin Valley Artists Association and the Mesquite Fine Arts Photographic Society — the room where the Intelligent Mirror Process got its name. He resides in Mesquite, where his mother Roberta Eiden and stepfather Richard Eiden lived for more than twenty years. His stepfather's carved wooden toys are in the Mesquite Heritage Museum and on view at City Hall.
Mission
He is building a curriculum so IMP can be taught through local art grants, and hopes to open galleries of his own. Beyond the gallery, his mission is TAMS — the Total Addiction Management System: his system and methodology for managing addictions. He treats IMP as a healing and recovery tool inside it — reflection as practice.
“Art is truly a matter of heart.”
— Bradley Marston