"In The Studio" new works by Randal Gordy Lee

"Home" acrylic on board, 42"X58", 2008

My paintings are composed from many sketches from journals that I write and draw in nearly every day. From these sketches certain compositions and postures haunt me and I have a need to repeat them. It is only when they find themselves in the process of the painting that I find a home for the image that I need to express. Sometimes this comes quickly and sometimes it will take longer than the rest of the paintings I am working on combined.

"Starling" acrylic on board, 42"X58", 2008

I like the strength that line can give to two dimensional painting. The play with perspective, showing as much of a story in a confined space, and leaving allot for ones imagination to fill in the rest. In part these paintings are as much a mystery of what they will become for me as they for the audience.

"Writer's Block" acrylic on board, 42"X58", 2008

This series of paintings and sketches has been greatly about solidarity. There has been allot of change in my life in the past few years and this has been the first story of work since these changes. The paintings, because of the devoted time it takes to make them have much more significant meaning to my expressionist style than the completed ink works in my recent past.

In my next blog I will talk about the change in my ink work and how I feel it is different in its process to the paintings I have been doing in the past eight years.

"Writer's Block" acrylic on canvas, 42"X58"

"In The Studio" new works by Randal Gordy Lee

"In The Studio 1" 50"X50"

acrylic on canvas, 2008

I am an expressionist with an attraction to line, which is very present in my paintings. I’m a modern romantic that loves to portray narratives in timeless settings that tell stories through theatrical moments.
“In The Studio” is a series of works that are the result of several sketchbooks that I had done in the cold winter months. The feel of line at winter, especially on very cold sunny mornings, is sharp, hard, and reflects quickly from the surface.
I was born and raised in Nova Scotia. I have lived in Toronto for the past eight years with my wife and two children. Before coming to Toronto, I lived in Vancouver, B.C., and Canmore, Alberta. I have no formal art education, but I was encouraged early on in life by my Mother to explore and nurture my interests and talents in art.
I had personal art tutors in high school and I was home schooled in the three years of junior high school.
I was an avid bird watcher; John James Audubon and Robert Bateman were admired. Later I became fascinated in architecture and designers like Frank Lloyd Wright. Edgar Degas and William Blake I loved for gesture, form and anatomy and the power of story through art. Later I would find a connection in Edvard Munch for his raw soul searching expressionism.
While living in Toronto, I have been in several group shows and art auctions, such as RAW (Riverdale Art Walk), Sunnybrook Art Auction, Art Party, Exile Group show and many others.

"In The Studio 2" 48"X62"
acrylic on canvas, 2008

Waiting

I still see a glow after I close my eyes.
I find myself thinking of home again.
The battered bulb,
The incessant moth,
The acrid summer night, lost in my own back yard.
Shooting beer bottles of the lightning rods.
Burning the earth to stone.
Pounding the deafening night with music,
Trying hard to escape the home I never sought.
Now I try to slow down as my speeding past accelerates to infinity,
The black tar of reality.
I will return too broken bottles and empty chairs,
Stars left lonely waiting to stare down on me,
And the thoughts that took me away from there.

One

"One" acrylic on canvas, 72"x96", 2002

When I was in the process of making this painting, I became engaged to my wife Danielle.
Aside from some mural work this was the largest painting on canvas I had done to date. I was not living with Danielle at the time, and I could not paint it in the studio I was presently in because of its sheer size. So some really great and wonderfully creative friends of mine lent me the living room of their house for two months. I thank Norman, Annie, Bernice, and Mark very much for the fun afternoons of painting in their beautiful home. On weekends Norman would invite friends over, turn the couch towards the canvas (at distance), and people would watch me paint. The images are very forefront. Exposed in their sparse bedroom at dawn, a barren light bulb flicked on, and the figures so oversized that one cannot help but feel like they are intruding. It is a very voyeuristic painting. So I guess, in this context, very appropriate that I had an audience at times watching me expose this painting to reality.

New Study

I started on some watercolors this weekend. A continuation of the last series of inks I had done. The imagery is similar, manipulating human form to express mood. There is something in this that I want to see more of. The placement of the form in a super exposed environment, leaving a stark reality to the disfigured form’s nakedness, a desert, an ocean, places that the self can't hide but can very much be forgotten by society.

There is always a key or a way out of our hardships but we are often unaware of them because of the fury of negative thoughts we are overburden by. How many times does one today, stop for even one moment to not think about anything without the wave of, "must do this, and must do that", washing up upon our shores of rushed responsibilities.

I've been puttering at cleaning up my studio. So much paper, so many little things that I don't know what to do with. Things that you know would get used if they had a proper place to be remembered.
Thoughts are like this. Our awareness of our environment is like this. Coincidence is not some gift given to guide our direction, but rather your sudden awareness of something that was always there in front of our eyes wide shut. It is when the mind is quiet from our stress and responsibilities that we can organize the clutter, giving a proper place for those thoughts we need to express.

I would not want to know myself if I had not continued to write and create art and be inspired. If I had let the gods of hopelessness and anger and depression blind me of what I could become, then I would be an empty spirit waiting till the end.

Your glass is never meant to be full because one needs room to fill it.

The beginning

The Beginning


This blog is my own way to communicate my views about life and art, my loves, my losses, my revelations, my growth in being human.

I hope to find a little of my past, and dream a little of my future. But mostly I wish to focus on myself, in the now, and in the present moment, snapshots of my thoughts without what could be or could have been, making best of the present.


I have had more time recently at home due to minor surgery caused my Cohn’s disease. I usually write in my journal everyday, but I decided I would try and get with the times and try this blog. I sketch and write allot but a new business that my wife, Danielle, and I opened a year and a half ago has taken up allot of my time, so my time to visit my old art friends, do the gallery hop and promote my work has become less important than just making sure that the story of my work represents me. We also have two beautiful children, Elliott who is 3-1/2 and Polly Joe who is 1-1/2. They are a huge handful, but they open your eyes to what is so great about life and never fail to amaze you in the way they perceive and approach living and adapting.

Last fall my wife was diagnosed with locally advanced breast cancer. She, a powerful pillar in my life, has cemented the belief in me that she is a hero. To have gone through the battle she has endured in the past nine months to keep cancer from conquering her spirit gives me great pride in being her husband. Her recent CT scan showed negative to any spread, and her tumor markers are normal. She has changed to a macrobiotic diet and meditates as often as she can. She fully understands the importance of living in the moment.


The name of this blog is TAR, Toronto Art Revival. Whether this name will go any farther than these pages, I can't say. It is just a name and what will come will hopefully give it definition.