Randall Tiedman at the Ross Art Museum in February

“After many years of doing figurative work I have returned to doing landscapes. I use no photographs or reference material in my work. I have no preconceived idea other than a very general sense of where the painting is going. I rely on memory to generate ideas during process.

I have been greatly influenced by the Hudson River school with their sense of grandeur and stunning technique. However, I do not live in the Catskills among scenic hills and rivers which were so important to their work. I live in an industrial blue collar city with broken, fallen structures, rectangular pools, rusted girders and panoramic vistas of salt mines amidst steel factories and river barges. The city intertwines these elements with sports stadiums and office buildings among periodic breaks of lush greenery. The small tracks and roads intertwine to create a complex detail of the marriage of industry and city life. The iron bridges and petrochemical plants and office buildings have become my mountains amidst industrial ports that wind their way through this labyrinth of decay and rebuilding.

My work has been described as “dystopian,” or defined as commentary of ecological concerns. There is no conscious attempt by me to address concerns of the environment. I perceive the elements of light and dark generated by these vast panoramic scenes at night near dusk to be quite grand and it reflects my romantic sensibility. The only rule I insist on in these compositions is to maintain balance in the composition. The mind unconsciously craves that however intricate and involved a scene my be there must be a sense of harmony and balance in the compositional elements of a painting. In painting industrial landscapes, the painting becomes abstract in the sense that the pictorial logic becomes difficult to understand in a purely literal sense. The mix of roads, girders, and buildings intersecting become difficult to untangle as to where some edge of a building ends and a road begins, drawbridges interweave among utility poles cross-stitched among debris and discards from factories…”

-Randall Tiedman

Artist’s website

Randall Tiedman’s paintings will be on exhibit at the Ross Art Museum on campus from February 14 to April 1. The artist will give a gallery talk at 4:15 p.m. on February 16.