By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Kevin Madaras, the owner of Myla Marcus Winery in downtown Bowling Green, gets an earful from customers on the current exhibit of paintings by Randy Bennett.
Often patrons come in for a glass of wine and don’t notice the art on the walls at first. “They look up, and it’s like a reckoning,” Madaras said. The questions begin. What does it mean? “I enjoy seeing people’s reactions.”
That’s just the response that Bennett wants.
“I don’t want it to be offensive,” he said. “I want it to be hard to ignore. … In all my work something in the picture is looking back at you. They’re not passive pictures.”
That the figures are near life size adds to the impact.
The dozen or so paintings at the winery are characteristic Bennett pieces, a mixture of surrealism, pop culture references, and social commentary. They come across as illustrations from the histories of alternative universes.
Depression Era figures (modeled loosely on Bennett’s grandfather) watch a couple of space travelers slug it out. Toy soldiers manuever on a landscape formed by the faces of children wearing gas masks. A boy, not unlike Bennett himself, cries over his “first kill” on what looks like the cover of a Golden Book. Bennett recalls as a boy begging for a BB gun, and then chasing after anything that moved until he shot and killed a robin. “I didn’t get another gun until I was an adult.”
Vintage advertisements and illustrations are worked into the paintings like ghosts of a previous time. “To me that’s a whole other dimension,” he said. “I love layers.”
In the painting “Trailways,” a young Black woman, dressed up for travel, stands in the foreground. Behind her a sign reads “Colored waiting.” There’s a nun and a glamorous model from an ad on one side. On the other, a trio of White men in work clothes stand watching with a mixture of amusement and surliness.
There’s also Woody Woodpecker. The animated bird was drawn by Walter Lantz, who also drew the “Lil’ Eightball” cartoons where the humor was rooted racist stereotypes. Cartoonists of the time trafficked in such images, Bennett said. “Racism was so rampant” in American culture that people didn’t even recognize it as racism, unless they were the target of it.
Lil’ Eightball peers out at the viewer from behind one of the men’s legs.
“It’s just a way for me to think through a situation,” Bennett said of his work. “I don’t want any of this stuff to preach. … I want the work to be distinct, well executed, and difficult to ignore. If they touch on those three things then that’s all I can ask.”
He added: “The final say is with the viewer. They don’t care what I thought. They’re going to bring their life experience.”
The public expressed its approval when he won the People’s Choice Award in the Art Walk in downtown Bowling Green in May.
Professional jurors have also weighed in. He received a second place in the NowOH Community Art Exhibit now on display at BGSU’s Bryan Gallery.
Most prestigious, he received Best of Show honors in the Ohio Art League’s Spring 2022 Juried Exhibition in Columbus. That exhibit featured 81 artists from around the state.
He also has 18 paintings on display at Schedel Gardens in Elmore.
Bennett has painted every day for the past 10 years or so. “I wake up to a cup of coffee and wet paint,” he said. “I feel very fortunate to be able to do that.”
For 38 years, he explained, he worked for Kroger. “You can’t put kids through school and raise dogs and be a productive member of society” on an artist’s income.
He was still painting as he has since he was a child. “With one day off a week, I didn’t have quality time off to pursue it. That’s when I reckoned that if I was lucky and lived long enough I’d have the second half of my life to do that. … If the planets lined up at some point, I would be able to do this every day.”
Now at 67, “the prime of life,” he’s living the dream that started in childhood.
Bennett grew up in Zanesville. At some point in elementary school, he won an award for his art, and that made him think this was something he was good at. When he was about 10, he saw an article in Life magazine about surrealist painter Salvador Dali.
“It was like: ‘This is not a bowl of fruit!’ This is something else completely. The light bulb went off that art was a powerful form of communication,” he recalls. “It changed my whole way of thinking. It became a tool for me to work through a whole set of problems, issues that with a painting you could work out. For a pre-teen, it was startling in a crazy cool way.”
He also admired Dali for all the bizarre imagery and juxtapositions, “he painted so well.” His technique brought these surreal visions into reality. “I thought right away I needed to be able to depict images in a correct manner,” Bennett said.
He took numerous art classes, and eventually graduated from high school a year early. “I was not a very good student,” he said. “It was not working very well for them or me.”
He headed to the Florida Keys and painted there for a couple years. But he found he needed some stability. He moved to Bowling Green, reconnecting with Rhoda, who was his girlfriend from sixth grade, who was a student at BGSU.
Together they raised two children and a number of bull terriers, which they show. Bennett doesn’t do commissions but he does a painting every year to raise funds for the Bull Terrier Club of America.
He didn’t start exhibiting his work until he was painting full time. The first paintings he showed were at the Wood County Fair. For years he participated in Art Walk by setting up his easel in Grounds for Thought. This year was the first during which he exhibited work.
The coffee shop had “a cool vibe,” Bennett said. “I was not very confident about the work, and I set up there.”
He faced his easel with his back to the passers-by, listening to the buzz of their conversation. “It felt very comfortable from that point on. I really enjoyed doing it. … If you interact with anyone, it’s usually complimentary, so you have a new best friend.”
People will have a chance to interact with Bennett’s paintings at Myla Marcus until at least September. The exhibit in the welcome center at Schedel Arboretum and Gardens will also continue until mid-September. A reception for the artist will be held there July 21 from 5-7 p.m.
