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Artist creates masterpieces by injecting paint into bubble wrap

"My bubbles are not pop-able - the paint inside is dry!"

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By Fiona Jackson via SWNS

Meet the artist who creates stunning works of art by using up to 4,000 syringes to inject paint into bubble wrap.

Bradley Hart, 48, fills individual syringes with paint and then spends nearly a month filling up the air pockets to create massive artworks.

Screenshot of Bradley Hart and his bubble wrap art. (Bradley Hart via SWNS).

"Everyone says 'that's incredible', 'I could've never thought of that' and 'I want to pop it!," said the dad of one from Jersey City, New Jersey.

"But my bubbles are not pop-able - the paint inside is dry!"

Up-close, they look like lots of bubbles of paint, but when a viewer stands back, they can see that all the tiny dots make up a masterpiece.

Bradley credits his "aha moment" to when he spotted a leftover roll of bubble wrap after his first solo exhibition in New York in 2009.

“There was overzealous security guards, they wanted to do their job a little too much, and were telling patrons in museums not to touch the art," said the former estate agent.

“I was looking at this roll of bubble wrap in my studio and thought 'I want to make a sculpture to play with the cultural trope of whether or not to touch art.'

“You want to touch it but you can't touch it.”

He's since completed more than 100 bubble artworks, including paintings of Marilyn Monroe and Kobe Bryant, pictures of his wife Elana, 48, their wedding day and his own grandfather.

Bradley starts by creating a digital map of the piece on a custom-built piece of software.

He estimates he uses between 1,500 to 4,000 syringes for each painting - which are up to 77ft tall - and next spends a few days charging the syringes with colors.

Screenshot of used syringes. (Bradley Hart via SWNS)

The filled syringes are held in a purpose-built stand in the order he plans to use them, before he spends another day carefully preparing and stretching his bubble canvas.

He then spends around a month injecting each individual bubble with the correct color.

“When I first started I injected a few bubbles then walk ten feet back and would walk back and forth!," Bradley said.

"So I designed a piece of software that allows you to do the painting on the computer and then creates a map that I follow instead.

Each work actually results in two paintings : the colorful bubble wrap itself and the canvas behind, which catches excess paint runs and is peeled away upon completion.

Screenshot of close-up of bubble wrap filled with paint. (Bradley Hart via SWNS)

Bradley has always loved art and spent two years at a private art school when he was 11, learning the ways of the renaissance masters

He fought back against his classical training in college with abstract and conceptual works, but now sees his bubble wrap work as returning to formal portraiture.

“But on my own terms, as I invented the medium,” he said.

After graduating he dabbled in real estate and did art on the side.

Bradley drew further inspiration from the syringes themselves, alluding to heroin addiction with images of Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix.

"Depending on what I'm injecting, the bubbles take on new codes of what's imbued within them," he said.

"My work is a conversation about how we experience art online because my work is pixels.

"If electricity disappeared your photos in your computer would disappear- but my pixels will last forever."

Screenshot of a close-up of Ruth Bader Ginsburg painting. (Bradley Hart via SWNS)

Many of Bradley's works are interpretations of iconic images and paintings, but his favorites are the ones with a personal meaning.

'The Bride' is of his wife at the moment he said 'I Do'.

Currently, he's working on the Van Gogh painting of Montmartre, Paris, which was only unveiled to the public earlier this year after over a century in private collections.

Bradley has his eyes set on some heart-shaped bubble wrap from Japan, and his next solo show will be at the Anna Zorina Gallery in New York in 2022.

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