Randall Berndt & Christine Style

Randall Berndt’s drawings and paintings are inspired by the lives of famous artistsand other art (especially pre-modern), the mysteries of our place in nature, and historical events filtered through literature and mythology. An avid reader fond of immersing himself in art, literature, and history, Berndt gathers narrative possibilities for his work from a delightfully quirky array of sources, from the life of St. Anthony (patron saint of swineherds) to the brilliant but cranky painter Edgar Degas’ devotion to scrawny teenage ballerinas, Henry James’s complicated personal relationships, and Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria in his storybook castle at Neuschwanstein—to name just a few.

 

Berndt describes his drawn and painted narratives as “fanciful realism.” In his words, “These works are all adventures in image making with some relation to ‘reality,’ cooked up from free association sketchbook scribbles that beg to become more elaborately finished pictures. [They] are mostly set in some past epoch, warmed by the comfort of memory and the romance of history to act as protection against the unpredictable flux of our present day lives and any nasty surprises that may lie in wait tomorrow.”

 

Christine Style’s Stories of the Heart series are woodcuts that reflect on the roles our hearts play: physically, symbolically, spiritually, metaphorically, personally, and inventively. Starting with the universal symbol for the heart and a ‘talk’ or ‘thought’ bubble, each print is layered with images that variously evoke medical diagrams, Renaissance portraiture and religious art, and traditional Indian miniature paintings. Style’s masterful use of pattern and line and her eye for odd juxtapositions combine to create images that are both strangely familiar and curiously hard to pin down.