Robert Durham, AKA, Bobby Bridger, began his life-long career as a painter and sculptor in 1956, at the age of eleven. Bridger sold his first painting at age fourteen at Louisiana’s famous Caldwell Parish Art Festival. Since that youthful beginning, Bridger estimates he has sold over 300 paintings in various techniques from objective portrait, still-life and landscape work to non-objective Abstract Expressionism.
Bridger has a B.A. in Art Education from the University of Louisiana at Monroe. In college he focused on painting and sculpture while studying with Dr. William Persick, whom it was believed at the time was one of only 20 Americans with a PhD in Ceramic Sculpture. While becoming a popular performer at ULM and on a local television program, Bridger also began his professional recording career while still in college, signing with Monument Records in Nashville in 1967 and releasing several "singles" that quickly became regional hits. Upon graduation Bridger taught Art at West Monroe High School in West Monroe, Louisiana from 1968-1969 and at Richwood High, in Monroe, Louisiana from 1969-1970. In late 1970 Bridger signed with RCA Records in Hollywood and with the global music publishing giant, E. H. Morris Music. Even while teaching school and recording music, however, Bridger continued to pursue Abstract Expressionism and Geometric Abstraction almost exclusively in style both in painting, while he also continued to work in ceramic and wood sculpture. Throughout his career, he still does an occasional portrait to stay in touch with the techniques of objective painting.
Over six decades Bridger has been blessed to have multiple successful careers as a musician, songwriter, recording artist, playwright, actor, and historian. He has written, produced and performed 9 albums, published 4 books (two national award winners), and contributed essays to two anthologies featuring many of the leading western historians of the 20th century. He performed the leading role in Shakespeare and the Indians, Dale Wasserman's (Man of LaMancha and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) musical comedy, and in the American Indian Theater Company's landmark indigenous production of Christopher Sergel's theatrical adaptation of Black Elk Speaks. One-man shows and full-company musical productions of Bridger's plays ran for over twenty years in Wyoming and Bridger also toured the shows to various countries around the world. Fusing history, verse in heroic couplets, and original music, Bridger created the form of the “epic ballad”, best exemplified in his highly-acclaimed trilogy, A Ballad of the West. Through the decades of developing and maintaining these various careers in the arts, Bridger has continued painting and sculpting.
In 1986 Bridger toured Australia for twelve weeks with his one-man theatrical shows of “Ballad”, a landmark tour as the final three weeks of the tour were to extremely remote Aboriginal communities in the central Australian deserts. Aside from Caucasian Christian missionaries, no entertainers had visited these remote Aboriginal communities to perform music or theater. While living and performing in the Pitjantjara Aboriginal communities, Bridger learned about the creation of Papunya Tula, or “dreamtime” paintings. Immediately upon returning to America Bridger began to incorporate the Pitjantjara “dot painting” technique into his abstract work. This led to the creation of 117 paintings in this unique style, 100 of which Bridger sold to private collectors. In 1992 Bridger suddenly stopped painting in the style and decided to take some time off from painting to let his next direction organically evolve. In 1996 Bridger returned to Abstract Expressionism and Geometric Abstraction. This shift was predicated by the creation of several wood sculptures that indicated a return to carving in wood that started when he was sixteen. Bridger’s wood sculptures are done with mallet and chisel and are hand-sanded and oiled.
For serious inquiries to purchase work by Bobby Bridger please contact Melissa Tatum at melissatatum@bobbybridgervisualarts.com, or Click Here.