Essays

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’ Station Museum, Houston, the small paintings rhythmically ascended or were grouped to invoke stories of personal and universal significance. You don’t simply “view” these works, but must encounter them, meet them on their own terms, to see what they are trying to say, and what they are trying to bring about as a consequence of the encounter. They are visual poems, secular prayers, Rilke’s angels of the spirit. Birds are spiritual messengers – they move, rather like time itself, fleeting signatures taken in at a glance. Masters of travel, mysterious appearance and disappearance, astonishing migrations – birds come and go where man and beast cannot. Their flight is swift, high among the mountains and clouds, the Texas/Gulf Coast and seas beyond, their cries strange and ominous. Yet they are also near to us, serving as mediators between earth and sky. Randolph’s pristinely rendered, jewel-like paintings are worlds within worlds, promising voyages of kindred spirits to unknown shores.

“Birds of the Soul” reminds us that we are as applicable in the greater universe as we are in a grain of sand. Although they have been stimulated by Randolph’s grief to process her husband’s death, they also take narrative form from her ongoing work with the palliative care unit at MD Anderson Cancer Center. This series is about many things: about longing, good and evil, and those who fall between; about the mysteries of faith versus science; about the purity of isolation versus the messy glory of contact. Throughout, Randolph builds bridges to the spiritual. The cardinals, owls, woodpeckers and shorebirds are suspended in the ether or fly through doors and windows – their drama sneaks up and slips past almost before you’re aware of it. The deeper theme here, as so often in Randolph’s work, is memory itself; in these, she touches on passages of time and mortality, as well as elusive and ephemeral feelings and remembrances from the past. They’re a consistent whole: life, death, love, disappointment, more death, and ultimately hope and affirmation.
Lynn Randolph uses everything within her and around her to the fullest – an art that can literally take your breath away, of narrative richness that has gained in wonder, complexity and erotic beauty as it has gone along. All of these paintings give us more of what is filtering through her brain and heart – an interplay of what is remembered, what’s seen now and what may come. Her attention to both the micro and macrocosmic aspects of the world and her intuitive sense of their relationships, her rejection of barriers and boundaries, her commitment to a wide range of sources, has generated a profoundly original body of work that eludes easy classification.

Susie Kalil
Author and Curator