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Ad Code: 4
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An example of work by Randy Bacon
Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Randy Bacon
Dusty crossroads, wide-open skies, and peacefully
nestled buildings distinguish Randy Bacon’s paintings of West Texas and
New Mexico. His long, horizontal canvases, like calm, lingering
sighs, echo the vast, extended horizon of the Southwest region.
These scenes, which are defined more by architectural and geographic
features than by human characters, reminisce over farm roads and
forgotten towns tucked into the rural fabric of the Western
frontier. Many of Bacon’s sites attest to arrested development in
their dichotomous layers of past expansion and present
desolation. Although human figures compose a minimal, if not
altogether nonexistent, visual component of Bacon’s paintings, human
activity is etched in the agricultural use of the land and in the
artifactual buildings. With his choices of subject matter and
composition, Bacon searches for and maps the emotional terrain of each
unique place.
Exploring the back roads of Texas and New Mexico,
Bacon selects quiet junctures, rather than majestic attractions, to
epitomize the feeling of a certain locale. Avoiding the overtly
romantic, and replacing it instead with unpretentious emptiness,
Bacon’s work shares a commonality with the landscape paintings of
contemporary realist Julie Bozzi. Both artists focus on the
overlooked, the unassuming, the isolated. The dramatic loneliness
of Bacon’s carefully staged scenes suggests a just finished or
impending narrative. Time-warped combinations of past prosperity
and present stillness tempt the viewer with questions of what has
happened and what will happen at this intersection.
Bacon reveals the quiet, yet stunning, beauty of what we might
otherwise pass by too quickly. He plots the intermediary points along a
journey, the places one unthinkingly sweeps through on the way to a
more alluring endpoint. As Bacon reminds us with his emotionally
poignant paintings, oftentimes the journey is more important—and more
intriguing—than the destination.
Submitted by Catherine Deitchman, a writer living in Dallas,
Texas. She has written reviews and feature articles for Texas art
journals ArtLies and Glasstire. The source of her information is her interview with the artist, 26 October 2005.
© Catherine Deitchman 2005
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  The following is from the artist.
Artist Statement:
I have always been attracted to the quality of light, the precise
colors and the big skies of my native Texas. In communicating a
sense of place, my representational oil landscapes often have
a narrative, cinematic feel. I draw upon the people and venues of
my life to bring about work where past, present and future
become blended, where memory and reality connect. In the vastness
of the West Texas landscape, I search for situations that reveal the
extraordinary in the ordinary.
This land I am connected to often appears to be caught in a time warp,
and I try to capture the timelessness of its quiet isolation.
Education:
University of Texas at Austin, 1976-77, studio art
Southern Methodist University, BFA, 1980, journalism, studio art
Abilene Christian University, 1983-84, post-graduate studies, painting
Texas Christian University, 2003-04, advanced painting and drawing
Exhibitions:
Old Jail Art Center, Albany, Texas (solo)
Panhandle-Plains Historic Museum, Canyon, Texas (group)
Museum of East Texas Culture, Palestine, Texas
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