Essays

No Bluebonnets No Yellow Roses, ed. Sylvia Moore
Robert Hobbs, “The Reality of Illusion” p. 38-39
MIDMARCH ARTS BOOKS, 1988
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Although Lynn Randolph like Dorothy Hood, is concerned in her art with the realm of the spirit, she is not a Surrealist. Convinced of the reality of her painted illusions, which develop out of her own visions, Randolph will begin a painting with a dream, and she will patiently wait far other images to come her, as she works.

Randolph is a surprising mixture of sophistication and simplicity, and her art mirrors this combination of traits by being both knowing and naive. She keeps up with the latest intellectual trends, which include the French post structuralist critics as well as new approaches to psychology, yet she believes in Castaneda’s ideas and is fond of quoting his statements about the individual soul’s progress. Believing that we live in a post-paradigmatic society where modernism is simply one ‘ism’ among many, Randolph has concluded that a Renaissance style is just as valid as any other and perhaps more timeley than most since it can be critical of current art making and of the materialistic concerns of present-day society. She believes that this traditional style is significant for artists working today, since it refuses to adhere to the radical abstractions of art and life that have been too much in evidence in this century.

Although she has only visited Mexico as a tourist, Randolph is spiritually attuned to the visionary art of Frida Kahlo where feelings are communicated as memories of things and hyperreality absorbs the everyday along with the magical. Randolph shares the disconcerting quality of contradictions that gives Kahlo’s an so much of its power. Similar to Kahlo, Randolph joins liberal politics with charm, simplicity, and fantasies to mate a highly disturbing art. Her works are metaphysical yet simple, sophisticated, yet at times embarrass-ingly fresh. They demand to be taken seriously and to be compared to their Renaissance counterparts, yet they embrace aspects of commercial art that at first appear to undermine their seriousness. An example of her most important work is her painting of a rejected female being licked by a deer. The innocent deer looks like an illustration from a children’s storybook yet the painting is conceived with so much conviction that the deer has to be taken seriously. Created at a time when Randolph was going through a painful divorce and becoming a clearly determined feminist, the painting is important for transforming the traditional tree of life symbol into a piece of walnut furniture with a walnut branch resting on its top–an ironic comment on the role of woman as a ‘piece of furniture’ and a static fixture in many American households.