Katherine Bradford is a contemporary American artist known for her luminous paintings which merge abstraction with representational motifs, as seen in her work Fear of Waves (2015). Referencing outer space, Superman, Albert Pinkham Ryder’s nocturnal paintings, and the glowing colors of Mark Rothko, Bradford builds up her surfaces in thin washes that absorb and emanate light with an eerie beauty. “What interests me the most is the language of painting—how people are able to say things using paint,” she reflected. “When I first moved to Maine, I could see Marsden Hartley scenes. They were everywhere. Yet I was also aware of what Hartley had done to the clouds, for example, to make them his own: those vivid, wonderful...