Essays

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 dying informs Lynn Randolph’s drawings, which ambush us with relentless personal conviction and spellbinding strangeness. One of her great strengths as a painter is the ability to reflect our worst fears and anxieties back to us, even as she manages to infuse the grimmest scenes with absurd humor. The gloss of youthful vitality can persuade us that life is for the living, but leaving the world – slipping through our own veils – is no easier than entering it.

Where does the life go when a body dies? The wish to die quietly at home frequently doesn’t happen. Chances are, we won’t expire in the arms of those we love but in rooms full of bewildering machinery, tubes and uniformed professionals. Caught up in the medical paradigm of cure, we assent to heroic measures that may deprive us of final dignity. Further confusion emerges in a technological age when brain death, heart death and other circumstances cloud our understanding of termination itself. What is death and what does loss mean? What has happened to death as a community event and mourning as a communal practice? Why should we so often die unready in those last days of our journey? Randolph’s drawings remind us that we are embodied beings yearning for communion with one another, that we suffer pain and loss; that we struggle to transcend our bodies and our anguish by connecting with outer worlds and inner realms.

Although they have been stimulated by extreme grief to process the death of her husband, renowned sociologist Bill Simon, the drawings also take narrative form from her ongoing work with palliative care patients at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

For eight years, every Tuesday afternoon, Randolph has channeled the stream of consciousness visions of dying people. She conveys the fresh hell in store for all of us, but does so with sheer inventive beauty and stunning emotional resonance. Each narrative is about a single life – one that ends and then is gone forever. Each hospital room is an airless territory in which human beings are suspended in an alien world, a perpetual twilight where boundaries blur. The works deftly combine elements of the weird and scientific with acute psychological and metaphoric realism. They are painstakingly rendered worlds within worlds, promising voyages of spirits to unknown shores. Such stories suggest that we are as applicable in the greater universe as we are in a grain of sand. Throughout, Randolph builds bridges to the spiritual. Around that, she groups caretakers and medical authorities, friends, relatives and dysfunctional family members. Events are revisited and reframed, turned inside out and then right side up again. Twisted bed sheets become rippling seas or swirling constellations that expand like gossamer webs. Some of these patients seem completely at home in their sterile surroundings, quietly acknowledging ghostly visitations or drifting off in a pain-induced haze.

In Grand Rounds, the patient is surrounded by a team of doctors clad in white lab coats, stethoscopes draped around the necks. Their human faces, however, have morphed into those of pit bulls and hunting dogs. We may find ourselves thinking of dark and stormy nights on which mad scientists begot monsters. For the most part, themes of love, given or withheld, unfinished business, spirits waiting, course through the narratives. Randolph links the metaphysical as well, even suggesting that our lives are connected by jumbles of atoms and cosmic forces that, with untouched grace, hold the memory of where we’ve been. Clusters of stars and galaxies burst through the ceiling of a hospital hallway and surround a beatific woman in a wheelchair. Angelic guides perch on her shoulder and stroke her head. In Master Builder, we see a patient frantically moving his arms and hands as if constructing an imaginary church. An owl inexplicably soars through the glass window and across the room – a silent presence that occurs during the soul’s flight.

In each case, the air is inky black, yet flooded by a piercing light. Randolph covers the paper with dense pencil marks, obsessively sculpting and shaping the figures, actions and storylines. She edges toward the fantastic and then pulls back to offer credible ways to render her patient’s disorientation. The result is tightly wound, yet flexible work: realistic enough to ask for our whole involvement in its story, yet still full of the moments of slippage and dissociation that magical realism is so adept at evoking. But what we’re seeing here is something deeper and more useful: a desire to understand and substantiate the ultimate experience that defines us. As Randolph so powerfully conveys, we’re at our most vulnerably human once we’ve burst through those automated hospital doors.