Christopher Bardey

Christopher Bardey has lived in Las Cruces NM since 2007 and works primarily in printmaking and painting at a group studio at Four Points in Mesilla. He grew up in Indiana and Georgia, studying drawing, painting, printmaking and book arts in Athens GA, and founding the Crooked Man Press as a senior at UGA in 1993. With a BFA from the University of Georgia, art ed. training at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an MFA from New Mexico State University, Bardey is a little over-educated and a lot unfocused. 

Bardey’s representational works in printmaking and painting often place an alter-ego in an unusual situation. Engaged in some dimly seen narrative - no more understood by himself than by the viewer - the rodeo clown, wombat on the loose or suburban Schmoe tries on a new persona, seeks wisdom or does some other pointless thing.

Other works are more spontaneous and non-objective, beginning usually as automatic drawings that toy with space and dance with texture and color, hinting at visual references but rarely pinning them down. The hope with these largely abstract works is that they provide those elusive feelings of joy, wonder, humor and surprise that art can inspire in us.