Thank goodness for each other. None of us alone can be all that a human being can be. We all go through our lives with potentials that are never actualized. I think this truth lies at the heart of my friendship with Lynn Randolph. Lynn became what I wanted to become but did not– an […]
Archive | Essays
Slipstream – Essay from Exhibition Catalog
Kirk Hopper Fine Arts Gallery, Dallas, TX, 2016 All of these artists are coming to grips with the realities of who we are, a spiritual tenor both dire and redeeming. Their works have soul as well as nerve – a sustained shriek about power and morality in a new global era. The silent horror of […]
Birds of the Soul
Lynn Randolph has always been front and center at the cultural, political and social crossroads of our times. The spellbinding images of birds between two worlds, however, touch upon hot button, core issues rarely addressed by the mainstream art world – spirituality, life and death, grief, transcendence and transformation. Installed last year at James Harithas’ […]
Comments on Paintings by Lynn Randolph for Comparing Religions Text
The paintings that open each new part and chapter are all by Houston surrealist artist Lynn Randolph. Lynn and I met a few years ago, after she had read some of my work on erotic mystical literature and detected deep resonances between what she was trying to do on the canvas and what I was […]
In Relief
Translation from the Italian by Tom Berth Quadernidialtritempi.eu. no. 24-2010 “The Mysteries of Lynn M. Randolph between Obsessive Metaphors and Promising Monstrosity.” The poet is a pretender. He pretends so completely that he succeeds in pretending that it’s pain – the pain that Fernando Pessoa actually feels The visionary and metaphorical realism of the paintings […]
How Like a Leaf
an interview with Thyza Nichols Goodeve V. Cyborg Surrealisms Thyza Nichols Goodeve: In all of your work you lay out your evidence and adjust your level of critique but you also do something else that I gather comes out of science fiction (or is why you like science fiction). You speculate specifically through myth-building. Certainly […]
Living Images: Conversations with Lynn Randolph
Catalog essay from Millennial Myths: Paintings by Lynn Randolph, Arizona State University Art Museum, 1998 Lynn Randolph’s paintings infiltrate the fibers of my flesh and spirit. I mean this statement literally Randolph’s powerful figures protect, haunt, incite, soothe, instruct, and trouble me. Where I write, where I sleep, and where I eat, my daily life […]
Yesterday Inventing Tomorrow: The Imagist Language of Lynn Randolph
Catalog essay from Millennial Myths: Paintings by Lynn Randolph, Arizona State University Art Museum, 1998 At the approach of the year 1000 in Western civilization, alarming, even hysterical questions and forebodings arose, darkly coloring the thought and art of that time. Ideas of humanity’s place in existence and the cosmos were shaken. As another such […]
Moving Pictures
Catalog essay from Millennial Myths: Paintings by Lynn Randolph, Arizona State University Art Museum, 1998 Lynn Randolph situates her work at the nexus of the familiar and the unknown She conceptualizes that territory and formulates visual metaphors to suggest a narrative that precedes and follows the moment to which she privileges us in the icon […]
Excerpts from The Vocation of the Artist
Part I. Preliminary Issues Chapter 3 / Vocation p.30-33 The idea of a calling is illustrated in Remedios Varo’s 1961 painting, The Call. The central figure, luminous with radiating filaments of light, wearing and carrying alchemical vessels, her hand in a gesture similar to a Buddhist mudra, leaves behind those half-awake, half-conscious, people who frame […]