Random Thoughts, 1995-1998

Random Thoughts is a series of 6 paintings (oil/canvas) depicting women holding dolls from various cultural backgrounds. The paintings are meant to be donated as a series.

About the Series: In the mid 1990s, Rada created a startling series titled “Random Thoughts.” Collaborating with female models, Rada depicted them as protagonists in painterly dramas of reverie and personal history. Each canvas pictures a woman holding a doll in her hands, striking a duality between the plaything left behind in childhood and the choices made as adults. "Random Thoughts I" shows a young woman perched on a chair near a child’s bench. Apparently in a dream-like state and oblivious to her surroundings, the subject avoids our gaze by looking aside. Her
general affect and gestures are tense and upon closer inspection, her mouth and eyes are
etched with fine lines of stress. As she clutches her doll, it is obvious that the emotional contact
and reassuring rapport suggested by the childhood toy is never attained. The psychological
motivation intensifies as the doll’s face is purposefully obscured from the viewer. In other works
of this series, the qualities of the erotic are regarded in direct relationship to the innocence of
childhood.

In "Remembrance," a woman is presented in a costume and accoutrements that evoke
her African forbears: patterns in tan and black, a skirt cut seductively at the midriff and thigh,
and a traditional hairstyle of cornrows dropping to her shoulder. Her expression is forthright,
amused and approachable in the presence of her doll. This work may be compared and
contrasted to "Distant Thoughts," in which a seductive Asian woman leans back on a simple pile
of storage boxes. Looking sideways through half-lidded eyes, the subject signals the muted
possibility of dream and seduction in the presence of her doll. Her tight red dress and sultry
come-hither look recall Anna May Wong, the classic Chinese-American screen siren of the
1930s. Despite the traditional Chinese association of red with good fortune, it is perhaps a
touch of Hollywood glamour that the doll’s clothing color matches her own.

Each model assumes a pose dictated not only by formal logic, but by a dramatic persona as
well. Rada plays the eroticism of his subjects, having them stand or recline in positions that are
replete with multiple meanings. In "Meditation," a woman sits on the floor, legs splayed dynamically; in "In Half Space," a model seated in a chair folds her legs demurely. Rada undercuts simple voyeurism by holding on to the essential human truth of his psychological premise: Woman
relates to doll, which immures the male gaze and turns vision to empathy and identification.
He also consciously uses women of various races and ethnicities to communicate universality.
All adults have left the reassurances of childhood behind, if they ever experienced them at
all. What remains is the anxiety of adulthood and a pile of old toys presented as the nature
of psychological individuation. The significance of the doll lingers in our consciousness as the
paintings progress. They become metaphors for past choices no longer actively remembered
but still affecting our lives as the remnants of unfulfilled dreams.

The Victorians Thomas Dewing and Lawrence Alma Tadema depicted women as exaggerated
symbols, often externalizing simple states of mind. Yet these artists also enmeshed their
figures in contemporaneous and complex ideas of beauty and sexuality. As Rada updated
these conventions, his double meanings created a modern sense of ambiguity, intruding upon
our own voyeurism and stressing subtle forms of self-confrontation. Painterly technique is
paramount in this regard, because control constitutes an essential part of the series. Rada
avoided reflected impressionist color: his painted forms are cast in silvery penumbral light that envelops the described bodies in pools of umber or ultramarine shadow. The richness of
grisaille is deepened by the yellow silk of In Half Space and the bold patterning of Remembrance.
We are in a land of the fragmentary, where the past can never be reclaimed and the perception
of threat is merely the projection of our own impulses. Offering riveting focal points and
lush descriptions, “Random Thoughts” revels in the problems of the modern world even as it
adheres to the constraints of the figurative tradition.

About the Artist:
George Rada was known to have a serious yet playful nature projecting a lightness of spirit that
subtly changed the people around him. He was president of Artists Talk on Art, an organization dedicated to aesthetic discussion. His conversations with fellow artists and art lovers were often thematic, linking the role of the figure in contemporary art, the language of the Old Masters, and the future of art in general. His ideas were a reflection of his life, embodying a diversity that younger artists cannot match. He served as a captain in the United States Army Artillery, shipped out as a commercial sailor to the Caribbean and South America, studied at the Art Student’s League, and became an art director for a trade publication and then a commissioned portrait painter. He held a degree in classical studies and eventually worked as a consulting educator for the New York City Board of Education.

Greek and Roman mythology fired his imagination and infused his works. His interest in
myth paralleled that of the Abstract Expressionists. However, whereas the Rothko and Pollock
generation turned to indigenous narratives and abstract form as a radical distillation of Jungian
archetypes, George doggedly pursued Western classical ideals within a representational
framework as the best signifier of experience. In this regard, his formal journey echoed those
of Philip Pearlstein, Jack Beal, Al Leslie, Paul Georges, and many others who returned to the
figurative image after 1960.

George was devoted to realism as a branch of representational painting. He conceived of
it not simply as a style, but as a complex aesthetic capable of communicating the most subtle
emotional, ontological, and intellectual truths. He felt that this tradition represented a nexus
of practical and ethical knowledge embodying a humanist perspective. It unifies mind, hand, and
eye, defining a seminal role as inner guide to one’s life: pedagogue, taskmaster, religious advisor,
therapist, confidant, and coach. Although realism practices a dialogue with other art, it vests
ultimate truth in ocularity—in what one sees—viewing it as superior to anything issuing from
mere conceptual practice or studio improvisation. Albertian philosophy of the Renaissance
era dictated that art is endemic, preexistent, and must be extricated from nature. The inspired
core of George’s life became how to make such thought relevant to our own era. He remained
cognizant, diligent, patient, and thorough. Content to work each day, he adapted the persona
of the skilled artisan, quietly pouring himself into an image. He was absorbed in reflection, and
reflection became the subject of his art. (text by Joel Silverstein)