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Mostly cloudy with scattered thunderstorms mainly during the evening. Storms may contain strong gusty winds. Low 58F. Winds WNW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 50%.
Randy Allen: “A Distant Blue,” 2020
Randy Allen: “Touched by Orange,” 2009
Randy Allen: “A Distant Blue,” 2020
Randy Allen: “Touched by Orange,” 2009
‘If it’s looking back at me, I know it’s done,” says Randy Allen standing in the Gallery at Highland Center for the Arts, an array of his evocative abstracted landscapes looking back at him and other viewers.
Sunflower yellow fields, stormy skies, that thin sliver of brilliant orange light that bursts through between the mountains and clouds at sunset — with color and bold brushstrokes, Allen packs abundant movement and light into his paintings. Bringing together a sense of spontaneity and connection to landscape, his paintings are alive with intensity and intimacy.
“Feeling the Landscape,” Allen’s solo exhibition at HCA, opened earlier this month and continues to Sept. 11. The exhibition features about 30 of Allen’s paintings, oil on birch plywood board, most nearly square, almost all new work from 2021-22.
In HCA’s display case are a few portrait sketches, drawings done at Capitol Grounds Café a few years ago, when Allen was mentoring students, and they would practice drawing people they saw there. The case also features a few mountain biking paintings — one of Allen’s athletic pursuits.
“Feeling the Landscape” is Allen’s first exhibition since 1999. Woodwork has been his priority in recent years, but the disruption of the pandemic brought him back to painting. With “Feeling the Landscape,” viewers appreciate that he has again taken up his brushes.
Allen, who now lives in Maple Corner, was born in Montpelier, and grew up in Middlesex and Worcester. He drew and painted from childhood, with dump trucks and gravel pits among his early favorite subjects. He joined the U.S. Navy after high school and then went on to attend art school in Boston. Andrew Wyeth, Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bishoss were initial influences.
Early in Allen’s creative career, he worked as a salaried artist painting representational watercolors for a Boston gallery. For a commission, he painted 18 panels for a park carousel.
When Allen saw an exhibition of Wolf Kahn’s paintings, Kahn’s color and connections to landscape changed Allen’s direction. He returned to Vermont and turned to painting outdoors. Back in Montpelier, he co-founded North Branch Studios in 1987.
Maureen O’Connor Burgess, HCA gallery curator, has been drawn to Allen’s paintings since she first saw his work there more than three decades ago.
“I had thought of him as an abstract landscape painter — his paintings are not always site-specific and they bloom from his bold use of color, light, texture and some form of the world around him,” Burgess said. “But I realize in hanging them, in seeing them together, that he really is an Impressionist. His sometimes-unblended color and use of natural light — his visible brushstroke would say so. His bare impressions of the house, or the barn, or the paddler might say so. His landscapes are clearer from a distance.”
Allen paints in his studio, although his paintings have a quality of en plein air.
“His paintings embody that strong sense of open air. He has been to those places,” Burgess said. “He lives in those places. He carries them around with him and when he puts brush, to paint, to surface, his intuition takes over when perhaps memory is not enough and soon enough, on seeing these paintings, you know that you have been there too. You know that emerald-green next to that deeper pine, under that magnificent blue, or that rich unforgettable gold shimmering under a deeper shade of purple. You love that shot of red, perfectly placed, reminding you that something is changing. You remember that mist when you paddled early one morning. Randy Allen’s landscapes conjure the embodied experience.”
When he returned to painting in 2020, Allen explained, it took some time to get back to work that spoke to him. He tried larger format work but felt that they lacked spontaneity and cohesiveness.
“I like the smaller ones because they’re more like thoughts or impressions,” he said. “And I like square. It forces me to think about composition. Square, it’s not a landscape. If it’s horizontal, it’s like a landscape.”
“It became more about movement and gesture,” Allen said. “It’s kind of like abstract expressionism, but I have to hinge it on a landscape for it to mean something to me. I get lost if it’s all abstract.”
There are connections to specific places in Allen’s work — groupings of barns, a spot on Horn of the Moon Road, but he doesn’t paint them literally.
“Sometimes they start pretty literal, but then they don’t have any spunk to them – and then I attack it pretty vigorously,” he said.
“The abstraction in my paintings fascinates me,” Allen says in his artist’s statement. “I like playing with the emotional aspects of these scenes … The scene that emerges is a recollection — an impression caught out of the corner of my eye. I seek to portray that kind of rawness and power in my work.”
Highland Center for the Arts presents “Feeling the Landscape: Oil Paintings by Randy Allen,” through Sept. 11, at the Gallery, 2875 Hardwick St. in Greensboro. Hours are: noon to 4 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday; call 802-533-2000, or go online to www.highlandartsvt.org
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