Rande Barke: Narrow Expectations
STATEMENT
In a broad sense, my work is autobiographical. It references images from my father’s magazine and newspaper collections and reproductions from an iconic art store in New York. My process begins with sorting through hundreds of images. I make connections with how the images relate to one another and how they relate to me. I then set up a narrative that is largely directly related to my life, mixing my experiences with fantasy.
Rande Barke remembers the sweet acrid smell of beer “factories” when riding in his father's truck toward downtown Milwaukee in the 1960’s. A prosaic industry set in a humble and sturdy landscape next to lake Michigan.
Barke, who spent the last 20 years in New York City, exhibiting his art, is now back in Milwaukee. The culture and urbanity of “The City” provided a context that fostered five single person shows and several reviews in Art Forum and Art in America, as well as awards including The National Endowment for the Arts Scholarship and the New York Foundations for the Arts Fellowship in drawing.
Before working full time as an artist in New York, Rande taught art for 6 years. First at the University of Southern Mississippi, then as an assistant professor in the Art department of Syracuse University. His formal education was at the University of Georgia with an MFA in drawing and painting. There, he worked for two years with Elaine de Kooning who enabled him to meet such masters of 1950’s American abstraction as Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston. Willem de Kooning reminded Rande of his German speaking grandfather, Sam Barke, who left Europe to start a cedar post business in Gillett, Wisconsin in the 1930’s.
Rande left New York City in 2002, changed forever, after watching the Trade Center towers burn from his Greenpoint Brooklyn studio. He and wife moved to Westchester County setting up a studio in downtown Yonkers, 2 blocks from the Hudson River and the Palisades. The river and surrounding imagery was reflected in his abstract paintings and semi representational drawings.The great recession would take Rande and his wife to the midwest. Rande now lives and works in Milwaukee - the city he left at age 16.
