Madison, WI ARTIST STATEMENTI like to think of my art as composed of “made-up stories” but that they are not entirely baseless. My artistic project involves romancing, cajoling my interior story images out into pictures with shape and depth and implied movement. I also like to think that in my humble, scattershot way I am following in the great Euro-centric image-making tradition where narratives are dredged up from all different sources, not just sleeping dreams but also wide-awake dreams. To come to terms with their dependence on the power of the animal world the Paleolithic artists went into deep dark caves with their torches and some charcoal and produced dramatic forms of bears, lions and bulls –they invented powerfully expressive and magical illusions in a dream space. BIOGRAPHYRandall Berndt is the former assistant curator at the James Watrous Gallery at the Overture Center for the Arts and was for years the director of the Wisconsin Academy Gallery in Madison, Wisconsin. He received an MFA in painting from UW-Madison in 1969 and has pursued the life of the artist mixed with the demands of the "real world" ever since. Some career highlights include a major award for a painting accepted into the Butler Institute of American Art's 62nd Annual Midyear Exhibition, a 1996 Wisconsin Arts Board Visual Arts Fellowship and participation in the Madison Art Center's 1987 Triennial Exhibition. Berndt's paintings were juried into New American Paintings, Number 29 an exhibition in print published by Open Studios Press, Wellesley, MA, in 2000. In 2006 his paintings and drawings were included in the West Bend Art Museum's group exhibition Up North: Imaging North Woods Culture & Mythology.