Randy Weisbin — An Artist You Need To Know About
I love Randy Weisbin’s artwork.
Filled with nuanced color and light, her paintings are powerfully evocative. They invite contemplation and transport you to somewhere heavenly. Randy’s landscapes are always animated with a strong sense of place — and often with a nagging sense of familiarity. You want to be there. Or maybe you’ve been there before?
Randy and I go back a long, long way. We were childhood friends and would sit for hours drawing, writing books and illustrating them. We grew apart as teenagers, then found each other again just a few years ago. Randy teaches classes at a museum on Long Island. Her home is filled with her stunning paintings from down low to up high, on every wall. This is a vast and impressive lifetime of work, a treasure trove.
Click on any of these images to see them in their entirety. Mouse over the enlarged image for painting details.
We have different styles. Different points of view. But I can look at her work and she at mine in a most helpful way. Over the past several years, Randy has become my most important mentor and critic. She is one of the few people whose opinion I regularly seek out whenever I get stuck in a painting or have trouble navigating a passage in life.
Some examples…
When I was struggling with one of the buildings in the Ghost Army series:
“I think in the Torcé painting you may want to exploit texture and color more, putting down adjacent strokes of different colors of the same value. So if your wall is value 2, say, you’d paint it with value 2 pinks, blues and yellows. Doing that without blending the different color notes creates more vibration and a feeling of light.”
And later, when I was working on the Ghost Army painting of the platoon:
“I can feel from your painting of the men that you are connecting with them and feeling the individuality of each. That’s what I love about doing people too! You can just lose yourself in them, in a way I rarely can with flowers and so on. I really feel like you captured the essence of your father.”
Painters may take classes with others, hang out with other artists, talk shop over coffee and compare notes on galleries and recent shows. But painting is ultimately a solitary task. Each of us stands alone in front of an easel, working through the concept alone, considering each blend of color and each brush stroke alone. Hours pass as we careen from excitement and clarity to confusion and despair, then back on track…alone. Always alone.
This is why it is so important – not a luxury, but vital! – for a painter to have a friend who can serve as a benevolent and wise critic, a first-responder who can re-start your heart when you feel as though you’ve lost your way in a painting.
How lucky I am to have such an artist for a trusted friend!
See Randy Weisbin on Instagram.