https://www.instagram.com/fishdogjack/

ANIMAL STUDIES Western Plains Cultural Centre 12 February - 1 May 2022

https://youtu.be/t6WbTFivuyw Andrew Frost at the vernissage ANIMAL STUDIES, Western Plains Cultural Centre, February 11th, 2022

Facebook link to per opening press Daily Liberal, February 10th, 2022

https://www.facebook.com/jack.randell.988/posts/10158465006147344

Catalogue essay by Andrew Frost. The Uncertainty of Reflection: Jack Randell’s Animal Studies.

 It is one of the common habits of the human mind to imagine that animals see us in the same way that we see them. After all, we look at them and they gaze back. Why wouldn't animals regard us, and experience us, in the same way we regard and experience them?

 We know of course that this is not the case, and despite ample evidence that animals literally see the world in a variety of ways strange and alien to human experience, we still assume some animals are sentient, like humans, with a range of similar emotions and motivations. For example, we imagine cats and dogs to have human qualities such as definable emotions, desires, and personalities. We do not attribute a personality to an invertebrate in the same way we might attribute intelligence to a domestic pet, but when we encounter a forlorn-looking turtle in a fish tank, we cannot help but feel empathy. Yet the human habit of anthropomorphising animals tends to blind us to their essential inhuman nature.

 Art history is populated with animal studies, from the ancient elephants, horses and bison of European cave painting to the exquisite drawings of Michelangelo and Da Vinci, the works of Chinese and Japanese artists recording the domestic animals of their time, and the Australian Indigenous artists who produced the singular ‘x-ray’ bark paintings of kangaroos. The recording of animals is a deep tradition in art, one ingrained in human culture – and wrapped up in the values of time and place. The great equestrian English painter George Stubbs faithfully recorded the thoroughbred horses of his 18th century clients, producing as he did a record of the wealth and status symbols of his age, while the 19th century painter Edwin Landseer produced sentimental narratives featuring animals standing in for human beings and British moral values. Animals as a subject are never value-free.

 In Jack Randell’s exhibition Animal Studies, the artist examines the way animals display aspects of self-awareness through their shape, size and movement – that is, how their bodies determine their behaviours and interactions – and how this in turn suggests some sense of self-awareness, or what the artist calls their “agency and subjectivity.” Animals learn complex behaviours through interaction with other members of their species, and through interaction with their environment, and through their encounters with humans. Animals are both capable and adaptable, but how much of this behaviour is self-awareness?

 This question is at the heart of the exhibition. Through the artist’s drawings, video and mixed media pieces, many of which are the result of prolonged observations of animals at Taronga Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo, we get a sense of movement, relative size, and their surfaces, from fur and hide, to feathers and skin.

 Randell’s process was to unobtrusively observe animals that caught his interest. These included some of the most popular animals at the zoo, such as the rhino, as well as zebras, cheetahs, giraffes and Asian elephants. He also encountered some Australian animals including the sulphur crested cockatoo, the Australian white ibis, the echidna and the Western red kangaroo, all of which became part of the artist’s visual record of the zoo’s official [and unofficial] inhabitants. 

 Using a camera to photograph the creatures, and making quick gesture sketches, Randell created studies, in poses and positions typical of their species. Later, Randell then produced a series of line drawings of individual animals based on the photos. Using a scanner, the drawings were imported into the artist’s laptop computer, and then combined together, usually in seven layers. This produced images of the animals with multiple outlines, one overlaid upon the other.

 After having prints made of these multiple black and white outline drawings, and using a variety of techniques, Randell added touches of colour, detail, some added graphic or collage elements, and further drawing to create a sense of depth and texture. In some pictures, perspective is treated as a two dimensional space in which the animal appears to float, whereas in others the artist has applied colour, which, while not a literal representation of a landscape, still places the subject in a ‘ground’ a conscious reference the artist has made to Chinese brush painting traditions. 

As Randell worked in his studio, he began to experiment with other treatments of his subjects, exploring surfaces such as plywood and paper on which to place his studies. The overall cohesion of the exhibition began to come together as Randell placed these newer works alongside earlier pieces, such as works on paper and canvas, pieces that had initially suggested a continuity of thinking and formal experiment. Seen together, there is a connecting and developing visual logic to the work. Earlier work such as The Condition of Being Elephant (Asian Elephant) 2020 are in dialogue with later, more minimal treatments such as the lightbox works, Zebra 2021 and Cockatoo 2021.

By importing his zoo drawings into a computer, Randell now had the creative possibility of producing new pieces that took advantage of the image software's ability to produce variations, reversing and multiplying images, as well as output multiple prints at a variety of scales. This in turn meant that the artist was able to play with the presence of various subjects, with variations in their treatment. For example, the four panel Australian White Ibis 2021 was produced by flipping and mirroring a single drawing of the eponymous bird, Randell adding colour to various parts of the work. Some pieces were trialled in software before the artist then created them by hand, such as the paired large-scale drawings on plywood, Black Rhinoceros (agency) and Black Rhinoceros (subjectivity) 2021. These works, while much larger in scale than the Ibis piece, and the earlier White Rhinoceros 2020, attest to the continuity of the project, but also the subtle colour work at play, and what this produces in the viewer of these works.

Randell is a classical artist insofar as his practice is determined by a curiosity of mind that works its way through various ideas and concepts, letting each new development in his research influence and guide his work. The adding of colour, the multiplication of images, the layering of drawings, and the application of paint, it seems, is guided by both knowledge and intuition. I sense here a connection to two Post-war German artists, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, artists who, like Randell, had multiple approaches to creating an image, but who, crucially, also treated their images as but one layer in an ongoing experiment with form and effect. The works in the show that most clearly attest to this kind of thinking are a suite of smaller ink, pencil and pastel works including pieces such Sumatran Tiger 2021, Scimitar-horned Oryx 2021 and Barbary Sheep 2021 which cast their subjects among dots and lines that are in no way realist renderings, but visual interventions that vibrate the viewer’s eye.

The use of colour in the works is key to this show, indeed, it is its unifying conceptual approach. Colour acts as a kind of emotional trigger, playing as it does on the associations we have with various colours, and in the way they appear in both nature and in art. The optical, perceptual qualities of Randell’s works speaks to both the process of their making, and the way in which our brains order the visual information. The multiple layer drawings, the sectioned wings of the Ibis, the colour interventions, each suggest a reflexive thinking about the work’s individual subjects, but also about how they appear.

There is of course now way that humans can ever truly know what an animal ‘thinks’ or ‘feels’. We do not understand the true function or process of human emotions, memories or dreams, let alone how human identity is formed or functions. Certainly, we have theories about them, but the uncertainty of these theories and concepts tells us that we are as mysterious to ourselves as animals.

There is another certainty about the human mind, and that is that we imagine ourselves apart from the rest of the natural world. Only humans, as far as we know, create art, have something called ‘culture’, and only humans [or at least many of us] have decided we have little responsibility to the world we live in beyond what we can take from it, unconcerned with our effect on the planet.

This exhibition, while it explores the question of animal self-awareness, suggests something else quite profound: while we ponder the subjectivities of the creatures we share the planet with, we also consider our own. What are the values we bring to this exploration? What do we take from Randell’s work? How do we reconcile the state of the world, and what humans are doing to it, with our desire to preserve it?

Dr. Andrew Frost

January, 2022

Fishdog Studio Walk Through. YouTube 20 November, 2018

https://youtu.be/G2K8AMW0B7o

Review by Maurice O’Riordan. ART MONTHLY Australia Issue 266 Summer 2013/14 p 46

Tracks

Western Plains Cultural Centre, Dubbo, 19 October to 1 December 2013: wpccdubbo.org.au

Coursing its way along the Macquarie and into the cultural heart of Dubbo (NSW), or at least one of them, in the Western Plains Cultural Centre, is the exhibition Tracks by Dubbo-based artists Annette Simpson and Jack Randell. Both have sustained individual practices over numerous decades; Randell initially as a painter at a time when boundaries between painting and sculpture had well collapsed, and Annette primarily as a printmaker. Both have had their share of metropolitan life; Annette still with one foot in Sydney, maintaining a studio and teaching position there. 

Collaboration is a richly embedded concept in Tracks; both artists have collaborated on a series of mixed-media paintings, each handing the work over to the other to continue working on at varying stages; and the exhibition includes four large-scale collaborative works which the artists have set in motion and which involve hundreds of participants from near and far, both before and during the works’ gallery exhibition. Wattie Creek is one such work, a two-by-two-metre grid comprising 400 squares which are filled by the crayon colourings of individual participants. Each square given to participants already has some black line-work which forms an overall pattern to suggest the work’s source image: Mervyn Bishop’s iconic photograph of PM Gough Whitlam pouring soil into the hands of Gurindji elder Vincent Lingiari, at Wattie Creek (NT), 16 August 1975. Bishop, who’d spent some of his early schooling in Dubbo, was a guest speaker at the exhibition’s official opening early November. A framed print of his colour photograph hangs beside the sprawling Wattie Creek mosaic-grid which takes up the gallery’s central wall.

On an adjacent wall is another mosaic-grid-based work, Read Between the Lines, comprising 120 sheets of paper, each bearing an etched line by Simpson (its overall outline softening the grid), and each worked on by 120 different participants: from well-established artists to the totally amateur – free to create anything on the sheet provided without a specific thematic or visual anchor. It makes an interesting foil to Wattie Creek with its more politicised frame of reference, even as this work’s evolving image clearly takes on its own aesthetic life. Both works, in fact, suggest an aesthetic of democracy – as act and ideal.

The grid-form and its sense of pixilation is fulfilled in the collaborative (108-part) video-mosaic work, Oh, the river people, screening on the gallery’s back wall, an audiovisual ode to Dubbo’s Macquarie River, or Wambool as known in the local Wiradjuri language. Beside its dream-like flickering hangs a number of Randell’s Black Snake mixed media paintings. Yes, the exhibition still has a home for the individual hand including Simpson’s Me ‘n Mum ‘n Nan ‘n Special Nan collagraph print, a striking genealogy-by-knickers. And a home too for the stone bush-curlew, a critically endangered species in the state, whose plight informs the other collaborative work in Tracks, an interactive piece involving a stamp modelled on the curlew’s footprint. At opposite ends of the gallery Bush Stone-Curlew and Oh, the river people fittingly frame the exhibition’s democratic bent in terms of an ecology.

The video work Oh, the River People is viewable at: http://vimeo.com/77194433 

Catalogue essay by Simryn Gill. Fishdogwood, Carriagework 2008

Light and shade

You could say that making a painting of something, a place, or landscape, demands a long, slow look, while taking a photograph of the same needs only a brief second. A painting wants to remake light on a surface; photographs are made from light falling on surfaces. Jack Randell, in his painted photographs, and projected paintings brings both ways of looking onto a single plane. But in doing this, he crosses their wires: he confuses them, he mixes them up and swaps their languages.

In his hands and through his eyes, photographs are made from long, slow, deep, looking and paintings become projected light. He draws us into thinking about how long a look it takes to see clearly. His picture-paintings made me think about light as we might think about language. How do we learn a new light?

Recently, a friend who was visiting Wales described the green of the countryside as 'blinding' in a postcard she sent me. After nearly 12 years in Sydney, I still long for the egg-yolk light of the equatorial afternoons of Malaysia. Jack Randell showed me that the dark pools of shade under trees and awnings in the nuclear fusion light of Australian summers is purple in the local language, and not the impenetrable smoky black of my untrained translation.

Review by Sasha Grishin. ART MONTHLY Australia Issue 41 June 1991 p 20

Eye Level: Paintings by Martin Coyte and Jack Randell

Twelve years ago I first encountered Martin Coyte's work at the Orange Festival of Arts. At that time he had just returned to his native Orange from training in Sydney at the Julian Ashton School, National School and the Alexander Mackie College. In his large. scale paintings he was relating delicate, fluidly drawn nudes to the wide expanses of the local landscape. In a way it was an attempt to reconcile the sophisticated linear grace which was so prevalent on the Brett Whiteley-dominated Sydney art scene to the more traditional values of Australian landscape painting. 

Martin Coyte's ten paintings in the present touring 'Eve Level' exhibition, organised by the Dubbo Regional Art Gallery, are drawn from work executed over the past five years and show a consistency in the conceptual preoccupations as well as a marked development in the formal language. The concern with a multi-tiered composition has remained constant as several superimposed images float ambiguously over the landscape. His theoretical obsession is with what he terms a primordial communication': the use of symbols of man, animal, landscape and the strong cerebral, theoretical foundation to his postmodernist grid designed to take us back to an earlier period of perception pre-dating conscious knowledge.

In his most successful oil paintings, including Mother Earth (1990), Blue Wren (1989), and Innocence (1990), the integration of the imagery and colour has been effective and the whole.canvas operates as a single optical continuum. In a strange way there appears to be an echo of Godfrey Miller's  ontological ideas of seeking out the essence of the and yet record the dynamism of change. As with Miller, Martin Coyte's paintings succeed nor because of their theoretical underpinnings, but because they work as paintings. They have a pulsating, shimmering brilliance which is more than a surface veneer and a firm formal structure.

The artist who shares with Martin Coyte the 'Eye Level' exhibition is another young locally-born painter Jack Randell, who also trained at the Alexander Mackie College and has returned to live in rural NSW at Geurie. As with Marcin Coyte, there is a strong cerebral, theoretical foundation to his art, which is again applied to an immediately experienced environment.The ten acrylic painted panels, all from 1990, involve a technique of heavily incised lines into the panel which gives a linear organisation to the work like a stained glass lead grid which holds the brilliant panels of colour together. Much of the work remains essentially an illustration of theory and only occasionally the quality of irony and the strong draughtsmanship are allowed to emerge. 

'Eve Level' is an important experiment in mounting a touring exhibition of contemporary art by local artists, curated by a local art gallery. It is an experiment in promoting and encouraging artists working in contemporary styles to return to their origins in rural Australia rather than trying to make it in the big smoke.

Press review by Yvette Aubusson Foley. Dubbo Photo New 05/02/2016

Showcasing the healing power of art

The healing power of creative pursuits has long been acknowledged, and this week will see the opening of an exhibition of work that organisers hope will help illustrate the effectiveness of art in helping people to overcome challenges to their mental health.

The official launch of the Pen to Power art exhibition, currently showing at the Western Plains Cultural Centre (WPCC), will be held on Saturday, February 6.

The curator of the 49 local and regionally produced works, Jack Randell, says the display of art acknowledges the sometimes, unspectacular journey from significant health challenges to recovery.

Randell has worked with NEAMI (a community mental health service) and the Rotary Club of South Dubbo, as well as the WPCC, to provide an opportunity for people with lived experience of either mental or physical illness, or a recovery journey of any kind, to represent that experience through an art form.

"I'm thrilled with the outcome. I'm not being clichéd or facetious in any way. I was unprepared for interest in this topic. It really has delighted me for the amount of currency that it has.

"It's an emerging thing, the notion that we can discuss private issues; private journeys; that's an emerging thing; but this exhibition and this concept has been the right thing at the right time, to make that blossom." 

Asked if it might become an annual event, Randell said: "It would surprise me if it's not or that it doesn't go elsewhere. We have some regional and metropolitan people coming for the opening. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody says we should do this somewhere else." Some of the artists have submitted their names while other's works are anonymous.

"It seems to have something to do with the stage of the journey of the artist," Randell said.

One of the artists, a Dubbo-based woman, has used the production of her work as a way of stilling her mind.

"I've suffered from anxiety and depression pretty much all my life but it's been very mild. It's been annoying and really bad at times, but it hasn't stopped me from functioning quite happily in society," she told Weekender.

"I've hidden it, and been determined that it wouldn't impact my kids for example. Pretending to be normal makes you feel more normal, but sometimes I just need time out.

"That's my time out, and I'll just sit and draw and my mind goes all over the place and the creative process gives me time out from all the stresses; it's a relief.”

In total she has put around 40 hours into her piece.

"It's the same as meditation when time actually means nothing. Time still goes by but you don't realise it because you've been in a happy place in your head and you come out feeling much more relaxed."

The constant management of her condition has meant she is constantly creative.

"I've never not been able to create. Even when I'm not doing artworks, I'm sewing or doing something, reorganising the house. I have to be doing something. If I get agitated or really annoyed, I'll just go and make something," she said.

"It doesn't have to be high art, it can be very crafty. Anything like that brings me back and calms me down from the anxiety attacks, and that sort of thing."

A significant component of the artworks in the exhibition is use of mind mapping interpreted in a variety of ways, including through use of video and audio mediums; a scrap metal sculpture and wool. Several of the works are interactive.

Faced with mental or physical health issues, which have transformed the artist's lives, often for the worse, the works plot a path to recovery through the power of the pen.

The exhibition will be supported by a public art program on alternate Saturdays. This program features works by young local artists and performers, bringing another layer of meaning to the exhibition.

On Saturday, February 20 and Saturday, April 2, Grace Farmilo will perform Grace, 1915. Clare Noonan will perform Public Empathy, 1915 on Saturday, March 5 and April 16. Kate Hagan will perform Five Performances for Imagination, 1915 on Saturday, March 19.

NEAMI National is a community mental health service supporting people living with mental illness to improve their health, live independently and pursue a life based on their own strengths, values and goals across five states, including New South Wales.

Entry to Pen to Power is free and the exhibition is open every day. 

Review by Kent Buchanan. Artery Daily Liberal Newspaper 2003

Jack's show an eclectic mix 

Wednesday night saw the opening of an exhibition of work by local artist Jack Randell. Titled ART, the show is his first solo show for a decade. On display at the BAWD exhibition space next to Three Snails Restaurant, the exhibition features works produced over the past 10 years. 

It is an eclectic mix of subject matter and media; from digital prints to neon and acrylic constructions reminiscent of the work of German artist Sigmar Polke. 

Jack is skilled at succeeding with whatever media he may lay his hands on, using them to filter through the detritus of the mass media and popular culture.

His images are packed with the familiar - transformed by their juxtaposition with other images and fields of colour and texture.

A handful of the works are the result of a residency at Haefliger's Cottage at Hill End. The Hill End residency program is a joint venture between independent curator Gavin Wilson, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery and the National Parks and Wildlife Service. 

Jack spent July 25 to August 22 at the cottage, producing a suite of landscape paintings providing an interesting counterpoint to the more experimental work included in the exhibition. ART will be on display until January 31, 2004 from 9am to 5pm.

Press interview by Natalie Holmes. Dubbo Photo News 07/02/2019

Jack says: art is a calling, not a job

Artist Jack Randell says that a daily dose of art is good for you. "Art is good for your health, for our mental and social well-being," he said. “And not just the art that we like, but art that challenges our sensibilities.” Mr Randell compared the feeling of pushing your mind towards different forms of art with doing an exercise workout. 

“At the gym we push our bodies uncomfortably to build strength. Same with art; get a daily dose of art to make your nerves tingle and your mind rattle — it will make you more resilient," he told Dubbo Photo News.

Mr Randell has been an artist for his entire life and says it's more of a vocation than a job. "Art chose me, it's a kind of obligation. I have been an artist all of my life — it's that kind of profession!"

Mr Randell's qualifications include a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours Class One) from the University of NSW and a Graduate Diploma in Adult and Vocational Education, Charles Sturt University.

But he says that his post-graduate studies in particular are more about gaining greater understanding than learning to be an artist.

"While I have postgraduate degrees that help me understand what I do, you really only require passion," he said. Mr Randell's Fishdog studio is his primary workplace but he can often be found in a range of other spaces or working on community projects. His work ranges from street art and murals to studio art which includes streetscapes, landscapes and animal portraits.

“Folks love to watch a public mural evolve, a blank space that was hardly noticed turns into a place of meaning, humour and surprise," he said. Mr Randell also loves collaborating and sharing his craft with others through ventures such as ArtClubDub and describes people buying his work as 'a great honour'.

His daily routine also consists of much more than making art as he also has a number of administrative tasks to tackle each day. "Coffee first thing, read something inspirational, exercise, check diary, schedule appointments, studio or teaching, emails, meetings, invoicing. It's the same most days."

Mr Randell says that the biggest studio hazard can be attaining that all-important alone time often needed to create.

"The work of a studio painter and muralist requires really high levels of skill, and that requires time and concentration, which is hard to come by in a busy world. Sometimes I just have to be blunt and say 'leave me alone for a while'." Another thing to be aware of is chemical hazards, but they are usually low risk.

Some of Mr Randell's current projects include a public mural featuring native birds in Trangie, a new exhibition program at Charles Sturt University Exhibition Space, curating the art program for Under Western Skies Arts and Music Festival, teaching Graphic Design classes at TAFE and advocating for more support for the arts locally through Creative Assembly.

Catalogue essay by Gary Carsley.     Honours Coordinator College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. 2007

AN HONOURABLE MENTION 

The BFA Honours programme at the College of Fine Arts is in its 14" year of operation and is generally recognised to be one of the two best in Australia, attracting students from all over the Commonwealth and increasingly, from abroad.. During the course of one year the honours candidate generates both a cohesive body of studio based work and a written document, usually of about 5,000 words that contextualises their developing practice within the framework of contemporary art and ideas. An Honours candidate at COFA has obtained a Distinction average over the course of their undergraduate study in all their studio majors – painting, drawing, time based arts, sculpture, installation, performance, printmaking and textiles in addition to core history and theory of art subjects. In other words 'they are our very best students'. Each has an exemplary record of linking practice with research, art with text, meaning with materiality. 

Without fear of exaggeration, you are more likely to find tomorrow's breakthrough artists among these hard working and focused individuals than anywhere else in New South Wales. It has been a signal honour for me to accompany them on this journey.

Welcome to tomorrow today.

Jack designed and published the catalogue for his fellow students in this exhibition.

Catalogue essay by Dr Peter Hill.     Associate Professor College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. 2007

It has been an enormous pleasure to work with the current group of Honours students at COFA. All honours years are exciting, focused, and generally produce exciting work. This year's group has been particularly dynamic both in their studio production and in their written papers. The breadth of the work is astonishing.

It ranges from easel painting to installation art, and from textiles to video and photography. 

But it is not the medium that is important so much as the honesty and curiosity of the individual minds, emotions, and sensibilities behind each body of work.

As a lecturer I don't judge my own success on the grades that each candidate receives. I judge my success on whether you are still making art ten, twenty, fifty years from now. 

I join all the other staff at COFA in congratulating all the candidates on their hard work, creativity, and individual research methodologies, and look forward to following your various careers in the future. 

It will be a roller coaster but it will be exhilarating.

Press interview by Wendy Merrick. Dubbo Photo News July 19. 2007

Artist ‘of now’

Contemporary artist Jack Randell has used his knowledge of the sign writing industry to develop a brand new technique which involves both photography and drawing, and his latest work has just been selected for a major drawing prize in Sydney. 

What do you do and why? 

“I'm a contemporary artist. According to art critic Michael Reid, contemporary means 'of now'. A contemporary practitioner is one who tries to read the psychology of the times as it happens. Sometimes it's a difficult balancing act. Contemporary art can be hard for people to look at from time to time. Sometimes it hits the mark just right, right on the time, and sometimes it looks a bit obscure... It might be decades before we get a real sense of what it all means.” 

Do you remember when you first began drawing and painting? 

“Yes I do, it was at Sunday School. I liked to go to Sunday School because they let you colour-in afterwards. We did the story of casting the net on the other side of the boat, and we were asked to draw it. I drew the net in the water with the fish in it and I was just amazed that I could render this story on a bit of paper with colouring-in pencils. It was almost as if I didn't do it, and I thought it was really exciting. To this day I still chase that feeling, that capacity of the hands to render something that's in the mind.” 

Which was the first piece of art you sold? 

"I sold a landscape painting to one of my mother's friends when I was about 13 and the sale price was $10.” 

From where do you draw your inspiration? 

"The way that disparate things come together in a picture, I can't do it with words, I can't do it with my actions. The disparity between environment and land use for instance, I feel helpless in the face of the complexity of that, but if I put the two together in a picture, the aesthetic arrangement that I'm able to achieve resolves that for me. Hopefully people see in my work a resolution to small and greater conflicts. I have them; everybody has them. I find resolution in picture making, and I think that's called 'the science of aesthetics' where relationships are drawn between things. 

"I choose to make pictures with sometimes beautiful things and sometimes ugly things. There's a romantic concept of landscape and a modern concept and the two don't often sit comfortably together, but what I do is technically, morally, spiritually bring them together and see what happens. I take any opportunity to be impressed and influenced by things.” 

Have you had any odd reactions to your work? 

“There was a landscape that I made which was very severe, blocked off squared colours, very flat colour, nothing pictorial. A girl kept looking at the work, then at the end of the night she came over to me and said, 'I really like that picture, it makes me feel like I'm looking into an open fire', and it was a landscape picture, it had nothing to do with fire, but she was quite taken by the work. If the arrangement of what I've done can have that effect on people I am absolutely thrilled.” 

Why did you leave the sign writing industry? 

"I didn't get out of the sign industry for reasons of disappointment; I was thoroughly thrilled to be in it. I got out of it because it had taken me to where I wanted to go, it had raised a family, made me materially comfortable, and I just didn't need to do that thing anymore and there were other things I hadn't done yet.” Best advice you've ever been given? 

“By my uncle who was in his early 90s. I must have been feeling a little nervous about everything in general. He asked me how I was going, and I told him that I didn't really feel that I had achieved, in my 40 odd years, anything of substance. He let that hang in the air for a moment then said, 'don't you worry about that young fella, it's a long afternoon'."

Press interview by Kim Goldsmith. Dubbo Photo News, Jan 2004

Described once as being an artist who combines the exceptional with the mundane, local artist, Jack Randell launched his first exhibition in nearly ten years last week, bringing to light a body of work that ranges from small contemporary landscapes in acrylics through to large mixed media works over a metre in dimension.

There was an element of curiosity about Jack's opening night, not just because it was his first exhibition in such a long time, but it was also the first exhibition to be held in the BAWD Exhibition Space, near the Three Snails restaurant in Darling Street, Dubbo.

Despite a hot, humid night and a lack of air conditioning, the reaction to both the artworks and the exhibition space was positive, boding well for future exhibition in this space. 

The works within Jack's exhibition are quite diverse, reflecting the breadth of time he spent on each work.As a rule he said he spends about a year on each major artwork, and in some cases, ten years, with smaller pieces done in between times.

The combination of common elements to produce a unique image is something that Jack has found people respond well to, the “Fishdog” image being one for which he has become well known. “People really respond to it, but they don't really know why, and I don't either," he said. “I suppose that's surrealism but it's not my intention.”

“I'm endeavouring to communicate something...you can do that on a wing, by accident, - by sheer will or through lyricism if you like. But I hone a concept down to a communicable position and I have to use graphic skills to do that,” Jack explained. 

The majority of the works in the exhibition are large paintings, which certainly make a strong statement in the exhibition space. 

“It's a natural consequence of my practice. Scale has an impression of its own from a design point of view...it commands more attention by size. A concept will develop in drawing small images, other pictures and culminating in a large work.” 

As for the messages Jack hopes to convey through his work...”Amusement! I hope that there's some notion of the spiritual content of my life and I'm warmed most when people respond to that part of it. People like pictures for different reasons, skill or colour or content. But I'm most fond of people who respond at that deeper level. I guess that's my aim to make a statement about the undercurrents of human existence.

The fact that Jack's Art exhibition has been a while in the making, he said, is the result of not working as a professional artist for a long time. His “day job” is as a designer and sign writer in his business, Aztec Signs. However, in an artistic career that started in the mid 1970's at Alexander Mackie College in Sydney, today he is  a well-awarded and collected artist with a reputation for high quality works. 

As for the future of the BAWD Exhibition Space, Jack has high hopes that his exhibition will be the start of some exciting exhibitions to come. 

“The space is absolutely brilliant and it's a credit to Brett Anderson and the BAWD associates to have created a dedicated space in a commercial environment. It's just brilliant," he said.