Byron Randall

Byron Randall (October 23, 1918 – August 11, 1999) was an American visual artist, known for his expressionist paintings and printmaking.

He was active in Oregon and Northern California.

A contemporary of artists Pablo O'Higgins, Anton Refregier, Robert P. McChesney, Emmy Lou Packard (his second wife), and Pele de Lappe (his final companion), Randall shared their left wing politics while exploring different techniques and styles, including a vivid use of color and line.

Born in Tacoma, Washington, Byron Theodore Randall was raised in Salem, Oregon, where he worked as a waiter, harvest hand, boxer, and cook for the Marion County jail to finance his art career.

In 1939 Randall trained under Louis Bunce and Charles Val Clear at the Federal Art Project's Salem Art Center; he subsequently taught there.

When he was 20 years old, a solo show at the Whyte Gallery in Washington D.C. brought his work to the attention of Newsweek and launched his professional career.

That exhibit was followed by others, over the years, in places that include Baltimore, Salem Oregon, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Seattle, Indianapolis, Toronto, Montreal, Moscow, Edinburgh, Leeds, and Inverness (Scotland).

Randall had three wives.

His first wife was Helen Nelson, a Canadian sculptor, whom he met at the Salem Art Center while attending her classes, in 1939.

Nelson was brought over from New York to be the first instructor in sculpture for the blind at the Center.

She sharpened his commitment to social and trade union activism, and her belief in his talent provided vital support for the fledgling artist.

In 1940 they married and moved to Mexico for six months, where they had a child, Gale, and where Randall continued to develop as a painter, inspired by the vibrant landscape and people.

During the Second World War years, while Randall served in the Merchant Marines, he continued to paint whenever possible.

His experiences in the South Pacific influenced his preference for natural forms and bright colors.

After the war, Randall traveled to Eastern Europe, as arts correspondent for a Canadian news agency, where he witnessed and painted the post-war devastation of Yugoslavia and Poland.

A predominantly figurative artist, Randall experimented with abstraction in the 1940s, and again in the 1980s and 1990s.

Throughout his career he produced still lifes, portraits, nudes and landscapes, in oil, watercolor, gouache, pastel, and print.

He also developed plaster sculpture, and three-dimensional collages on the theme of the sea (a recurrent interest).

Randall's concern for social justice ran across his career.

It was most explicit in art from the 30s through to the 50s, such as his 1947 'Diabolical Machines' print (held in numerous museums), his Spanish Civil War painting (at Hallie Ford Museum), and his prints of dispossessed Jews from the ghettos of Eastern Europe (at LA Museum of the Holocaust), created from firsthand observation.

Randall and Helen settled in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco where they had a second child, Jonathan, in 1948.

Five years later they left the United States for Canada, to escape McCarthyite anti-Communism; they had both been in the US Communist Party.

In 1956, Helen died in a traffic accident.

Randall and his children returned to San Francisco where he subsequently married the print-maker and muralist Emmy Lou Packard.

Between 1959 and 1968 Randall and Packard ran a guest house and art gallery in Mendocino, California.

They were political and environmental activists, involved in the campaign to protect the area from commercial despoliation and in the creation of the Peace and Freedom Party.

They attended the World Congress for Peace, National Independence and General Disarmament, Helsinki, July 10–15, as U.S. Delegates.

After the end of their marriage, Randall established a guesthouse/art gallery in Tomales, California.

In the 1960s, Randall satirically explored what was for him the grotesque pageantry of US militarism, using a visual vocabulary of ghastly females, skulls and skeletons that drew upon the folk traditions of Mexican graphic art.

As a contrast, he invoked the US's own iconic imagery of liberty and democracy, embodied in Abraham Lincoln, to whom Randall dedicated a series of oil paintings spanning two decades.

Randall saw the human condition as a dynamic struggle for justice or at times simply the struggle for survival, captured in his lifelong scenes of boxers and wrestlers.

He converted a dilapidated chicken coop to become his home and studio, in 1971.

This conversion brought him national attention.

So did his huge collection of potato mashers.

In 1982, he married Eve Wieland, an Austrian wartime emigre.

She was his wife until her death from cancer four years later.

For the last nine years of his life, Randall's partner was Pele deLappe, an artist and friend of some 50 years standing.

Randall died in San Francisco on August 11, 1999, at the age of 80 after a battle with emphysema.

Randall was an expressionist whose art was strongly responsive to physical environment.

Of his paintings he wrote: "the look of them might have been different if I'd grown up anywhere but in Oregon. Brilliant sunlight nursing the green valleys after a long rainy winter . . . there's a powerful bit of environment that would show in a man's work all his life. I've seen that creative communication has a vitality all its own. It's not a refuge from life, but an intensification. It's the practice of humanity. In painting I think the approach that best affirms life is expressionism, and that's why I became and am now an expressionist."