Alex Globerson
Berndt, with white beard and black hat, sits at studio easel surrounded by drawings.
Randall Berndt in his studio.
The windows of Randall Berndt’s spacious second-floor art studio look out on a winter sky of bare treetops. He says he loves watching birds and the occasional fox, the ever-changing clouds. When making an artwork, he can become temporarily stuck, wondering for instance how to depict the sky.
Not a problem. He can open one of his several hundred art history books to see how the old masters did it — his intention not to copy, but to be inspired. Or he can look outside. “You never see an awkward cloud,” he says with a laugh. “They’re all good clouds.”
Berndt is probably best known to Madison art lovers for his colorful, playful paintings depicting rural scenes, displayed over several decades in shows with his friend Charles Munch at the now defunct Grace Chosy Gallery. Berndt, 78, recently lost his wife, Wendy, to ALS, and now shares a rambling near-east-side home with his irrepressible terrier, Gracie. More than ever, the sanctuary of the studio and the concerns of the artist are central to his well-being. Yet, at least for now, Berndt is done with painting and is concentrating instead on his love of drawing.
One result of this new focus is a multimedia performance called Sketchy Ideas presented by TNW Ensemble Theater (formerly TAPIT/new works Ensemble Theater) at Overture Center’s Wisconsin Studio Feb. 10-12.
The show features Berndt’s drawings, or more accurately, illustrated letters, projected behind a group of actors (Anthony Novich Leonard, Liz Light, Andrew Lonsdale and Patrick Mahoney) voicing the text as monologues. The performers and solo violinist Paran Amirinazari are under the direction of Donna Peckett and Danielle Dresden of TNW.
Shows are at 7:30 p.m. Friday and 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. A slideshow of the featured sketches can be viewed online through the Overture Center’s ticket sales page, overture.org/tickets-events/2022-23-season/sketchy-ideas.
In his studio, Berndt has hung several of his recent, exquisitely rendered 20 inch by 20 inch drawings. Each bursts with activity and energy, as if perhaps a circus carnival had spilled out of a caravan in the middle of the woods. The highly detailed renderings depict all manner of creatures — comical, beautiful, grotesque — thrown together in a single scene.
Berndt works on these drawings for weeks or months, describing them as “a reporting of my inner images, including autobiographical details.” They take shape intuitively; he is interested in “traditional resources of drawing — shading, values, silhouette, hard edges versus atmospheric effects.” Using only a graphite pencil, rubber kneadable eraser, and paper, he concentrates on value (darkness or lightness of tone) to give his drawings greater dynamic range.
Berndt has a sly sense of humor and has always enjoyed cartoons, especially R. Crumb’s work from the 1960s and ’70s. He even worked for a while coloring comics for Kitchen Sink Press, a key early publisher of underground comics. He has also long been a fan of the tradition of illustrated personal letters, especially from the late 1800s and early 1900s, as well as other illustrated writing.
Loving books and the written word almost as much as he loves drawings and paintings, he wanted to create an organic connection between narrative and drawing. About five years ago he started sending illustrated letters to one good friend. With that friend’s encouragement, he slowly widened the circle receiving his cartoonish letters, which he eventually called “Sketchy Ideas.” Mired in COVID, Trumpism, and Wendy’s ALS, he had a lot to communicate to friends — not always about mainstream events, but sometimes simply expressing his own quirky mental meanderings.
Erudite yet not stuffy, casual in nature, and never overly serious, the Sketchy Ideas reveal something essential about Berndt’s gentle humor, passion for art and literature, wide-ranging curiosity, and dismay over our collective ills.
An example of one of the Sketchy Ideas, with handwriting and a drawing of Emily Dickinson in a boat.
"Wild Nights," illustrated and explained.
There are 15 Sketchy Ideas in the February show. In “Extravagant Thinking in a Time of Plague,” two armored, less-than-heroic angels shove swords into an ogre-ish head (that also resembles a Coronavirus molecule) at the top of the page. Below them, the text begins: “So here we all are, cowering in our homes…experiencing all sorts of elaborate mind weather: downdrafts of ennui, bewilderment, as well as plain old fear, doubt and occasionally hope.” “Wild Nights” presents Emily Dickinson’s poem of the same name. The poet is pictured lounging barefoot in a small wooden rowboat, her hair flying, as she gazes at the moon peeking through a wild night sky. The drawing has a wonderful feeling of lightness, buoyancy and joy, while the text wonders how the supposedly shy and reclusive Belle of Amherst could inspire such wild excitement in the reader.
Berndt laughingly describes himself as “like a monkish illuminator from the 12th century.” There may be some truth to that, in the sense that he is attuned both to history and to our current moment, and perhaps it’s this vantage point that allows him to uniquely illuminate our uncertain and astonishing lives. It was always his intention, he says, for the Sketchy Ideas to provide readers with a little fizz of joy, like a July 4 sparkler. He hopes the theatrical Sketchys will do the same for a live audience.
