The Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts (VADA) at Rice is pleased to announce the first spring exhibition Works on Paper 2009-2019 by Randall McCabe, artist and long-time shop supervisor for the department who retired in May of 2019. Works on Paper 2009 - 2019 will have an opening reception at the Rice Media Center Gallery on Thursday, January 16 from 6:00 – 8:00PM.
This exhibition brings together a selection of paintings and drawings from a body of work called "Drawings from the Equinox" spanning the years 2009 thru 2019.
McCabe states, 'The Equinox drawings are abstractions rooted in both a recurring formal paradigm going back many years and my predisposition to see the landscape as animate. They are an homage to the ink paintings of the great Asian masters, the cave drawings of pre-history, and the scribbles of small children. More personally, they are a subtle but incessant recollection which has threaded itself through my entire life and are, as such and as concisely as I can make them, a mirror image of eveything that I know.'
Randall McCabe was born in Philadelphia in 1953. Following high school, he spent two years at the University of Pennsylvania taking a variety of classes in art and design before enlisting in the U. S. Navy. He spent the next four years serving as a sonar technician on a Polaris submarine. After his discharge from military service he lived briefly on the New Jersey shore working as a house painter and spending the rest of his time studying and painting the shore birds he found there in abundance. In 1978 he moved to Seattle, Washington where, working as marine electrician in a shipyard, he began taking art classes in the evenings. He would go on to study art full time, earning his BFA from the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle in 1983.
McCabe moved to Houston in 1984, hung his first solo show in 1995, and since then has shown regularly in Houston and throughout Texas. Tending bar, in hotels mostly, and picking up other odd jobs over the next twelve years, he joined Rice University in 1997 as the Shop Technician for the Department of Art and Art History. Retiring from Rice in 2019 as VADA's Studio Manager and Lead Preparator, he now devotes himself to art full time. He is currently working on a suite of woodblock prints.
Works on Paper 2009-2019 will be on view at the Rice Media Center Gallery through February 10, 2020. Gallery hours are from Monday – Friday, 10:00am to 5:00pm. For more information visit vada.rice.edu or email arts@rice.edu.