Randall Berndt

Randall Berndt grew up on a farm near Markesan, Wisconsin, and holds an M.F.A. degree in painting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work has been exhibited in many museum and gallery shows, both juried and invitational. These include, in recent years, the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio (where he received the Juror's Choice Award), the Sioux City Art Center in Sioux City, Iowa, the Grace Chosy Gallery in Madison, and Edgewood Orchard Galleries in Fish Creek. He is the recipient of a 1996 Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship Award and the 1997 Mayor's Purchase Award from the Madison CitiARTS Commission. Berndt is director of the Wisconsin Academy Gallery, where he has curated two special exhibitions: "Maps of Encounter: The French in Seventeenth-Century Wisconsin" (1995) and "Rebirth of the Prairie: Aldo Leopold and Ecological Restoration" (1999). Though mainly an urban dweller now, Randall has a continuing connection with the family farm in the rolling woodlands and fields of southwestern Green Lake County. There he gardens, plants prairies, and wanders with his three-year-old son amongst the pine trees that his father planted. Childhood ramblings in those woods and fields formed an attachment to nature and a feeling for her mysteries that continue to surface in his paintings. Later travels to European art centers have added cultural layers and other kinds of mysteries to the images he creates.