Colleen Randall

Colleen Randall, Splendid Matter, oil on canvas, 72" x 65", 2018.

Colleen Randall (born 1952) is an American abstract painter and art educator. Her work is rooted in the abstract expressionist and sublime traditions and the relationship between nature and human consciousness. Art historian Sarah G. Powers has written, "Like seasonal and climatic shifts, Randall's work responds to nature and weather patterns through materiality and form. As meditations on the impact of sublime natural forces, her paintings transport us from the material fact of painted marks on a surface to a rich and rewarding imaginative experience." Randall has exhibited at the National Academy of Design and The Painting Center in New York, the Hood Museum of Art, and Delaware Art Museum, among other venues. She lives and works in West Lebanon, New Hampshire with her husband, poet and professor Jeff Friedman, and teaches at Dartmouth College.

Education and career Randall was born in 1952 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota and was raised in suburban Minneapolis, the eldest of six children of two teachers. After graduating, Randall began exhibiting professionally, appearing in group shows at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, Springfield Art Museum, and Vermont Studio Center, and featured exhibitions at Kenkeleba Gallery (1987) and the Hood Museum of Art (1989), among others. Spheris Gallery (New York and New Hampshire), Elliot Smith Contemporary Art (St. Louis), Dartmouth, and the Hood Museum of Art, among other venues. The resulting, highly textured surfaces vary from thick impastos to sculptural brushstrokes to thin veils of color. It was characterized by her use of dark, luminous colors (redolent of the materials of pigment), large tonal masses, and textures often enhanced by mixing sawdust and marble dust into the oil paint.

Later work At Dartmouth College in 2001, Randall presented paintings employing a limited palette described in a review as "musty khaki, creamed coffee and tree bark," with hints beneath of prussian blue, earthy greens, coppery blues, and greens. Works exhibited at Dartmouth ("Livia's Walls", 2009) and The Painting Center (2012) were inspired by garden paintings from the ancient Roman Villa of Livia, which she studied during a Whiting Foundation travel fellowship. Boston Globe critic Cate McQuaid described Immanence 4 as "a rocky impasto, earthbound save for its crepuscular colors, tangerine and periwinkle ... [its] paint growing thready, dissolving like spun cotton candy.