2006.04.07: April 7, 2006: Headlines: COS - Sierra Leone: Art: Painting: Santa Fe New Mexican: Sierra Leone RPCV Adam Randolph is a self-taught painter who revels in the grotesque
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2006.04.07: April 7, 2006: Headlines: COS - Sierra Leone: Art: Painting: Santa Fe New Mexican: Sierra Leone RPCV Adam Randolph is a self-taught painter who revels in the grotesque
Sierra Leone RPCV Adam Randolph is a self-taught painter who revels in the grotesque
"After Africa and Mexico I had the feeling, Why not paint? Life in America is absurd enough, so why not?" As a young adult he joined the Peace Corps and did a stint in Sierra Leone in the mid-'80s, which is where he began painting. It was a recreational activity, an opportunity to experiment with native dyes, and a chance to tell some interesting stories. But the disconnect between his background in the States and his experiences in Africa were startling, and the seeds of his current imagery were planted then.
Sierra Leone RPCV Adam Randolph is a self-taught painter who revels in the grotesque
Tubs from the darkside
Caption: Adam Randolph: Three Tubs, oil on canvas
Michael Koster I For The New Mexican
April 7, 2006
With a wink to James Ensor and a nod to Francis Bacon, self-taught painter Adam Randolph revels in the grotesque. In his canvases the darker side of the human condition -- hopelessness, distress, anxiety, boredom, and a certain physical and spiritual rotting away -- reigns. He sincerely professes that hope is also part of the rueful admixture, but I am hard pressed to find any light in Randolph's perpetual night. Yet the wholesale lack of anything healthy or positive is what makes his work compelling, in a deranged, R. Crumb sort of way.
Randolph's large canvases are filled with nude, asexual figures that are either disturbingly skinny or hideously obese. These intensely uncomfortable bodies are often placed in tubs in bare, antiseptic rooms. Fear, grief, and confusion -- or some complex elixir of all three -- are the most common emotions registered on their faces. Viewers will find themselves involuntarily trying to piece together a meaning to these disquieting visual narratives. Are the tubs, which evoke a morbid heaviness, meant to represent sarcophagi? Are the figures ghosts forever treading some disturbing psychic terrain? Do the scenes, which call to mind the stereotypical horrors of insane asylums, have some basis in reality?
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"These paintings are about the absurd," said the painter from his home near Nashville, Tenn., where he has a day job as a social worker for the developmentally disabled and paints his strange visions on the side. "The tubs? I don't know why they're in there. They came out of nowhere. It may have been something as simple as having a gimmick so I didn't have to paint the lower half of a person -- I don't know. I really can't remember. The point was and is to have it not make sense, because I really think our culture and world and art and education is all so geared toward making perfect sense. And I felt like if I was going to paint at all and waste my time being broke and in an impossible field, I knew it had to be what I most felt to be true. And the truth is that we don't pay attention to the absurdity of life."
Randolph is interrupted by his 3-year-old daughter, who is parked in front of The Wizard of Oz and pleading for more of the sweets she'd sampled that night. There's something endearing about hearing Randolph interrupt the gloom-and-doom details of his despondent figures and institutionalized settings to interact with his daughter. Randolph, who is in his mid-40s, doesn't lack a sense of humor. In short, he doesn't come off as a weirdo or an overly self-indulgent artiste, despite the abstruse quality of his work.
Randolph grew up in Washington, D.C., went to private schools, and lived a privileged life. As a young adult he joined the Peace Corps and did a stint in Sierra Leone in the mid-'80s, which is where he began painting. It was a recreational activity, an opportunity to experiment with native dyes, and a chance to tell some interesting stories. But the disconnect between his background in the States and his experiences in Africa were startling, and the seeds of his current imagery were planted then. After the Peace Corps he traveled a lot, spent time in southern Mexico, and was consumed with hard-to-pin-down emotions.
He decided to become a painter but went for a graduate degree in social work, just in case painting didn't work out.
"After Africa and Mexico I had the feeling, Why not paint? Life in America is absurd enough, so why not?" Randolph has been at it since 1986, but about six or seven years ago, disgusted with the business of building recognition and selling art, he gave up showing his work in favor of expending all his energy on the process of painting itself. So it is a radical departure for him to be exhibiting his oils at Linda Durham Contemporary Art this month.
"It really turned up the heat and the focus," he said of his hiatus from the commercial art world. He said he was undisturbed and able to go "stem to stern with one project" without expending energy or effort on outside distractions.
I asked Randolph about several specific pieces which I identified by title. He replied that the paintings were being renamed by the gallery, which had rejected his titles for being too long and overly complex. Losing his original titles didn't seem to bother him, though. Nothing, it seemed, bothered him much. One gets the sense that to Randolph this whole endeavor, while mostly cathartic and generally worthwhile, is quite absurd.
details
Adam Randolph -- The Bathtub Paintings
Opening reception with the artist 5-7 p.m. Saturday, April 8; exhibit through April 29
Linda Durham Contemporary Art, 1101 Paseo de Peralta, 466-6600
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Story Source: Santa Fe New Mexican
This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Sierra Leone; Art; Painting
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