Randy Boogie

Artist Statement: Killingly Beautiful

Killingly Beautiful — a phrase that lives between contradiction and ceremony. This new body of work exists where beauty wounds and memory drips in techinicolor bruise. It is graffiti that never asked for permission, from grimey to shiny now framed in white walls that once tried to erase it.

Each piece I make is a spirit scar in disguise — abstract codes of the street, layered in grief, silence & soul surviving. Im a sacred defiant one. I don’t paint popular flavor of the month type shit. I expose what genocide has tried to forget. My lines aren’t straight. They’re fractured, like the war stories of an up rock war dancer. A Native B-Boy who never got to tell theirs on a larger platform outside of a dance cypher, but I learned how to suspend that same animation through paint now being viewed in galleries.

You see, I come from the corner of 800 block where letters were given to me based on the streets where I lived, where roll calls were protected by con safos. The work is still coded — symbols of love, loss, and indigenous identity is buried in abstract paint and texture. You can see the resemblance of the ancient ones that wrote petroglyphs. As well as symbolism taught to me by elders through ceremony. Some of these teachers have become whispers from someone who has left into the spirit world.

When I  finish a painting they are not just decorations. They’re documentations as well as amulets.

I create my art on canvas to look like what I expressed on concrete walls, because that’s what raised me.

Killingly Beautiful is the name of the feeling — when something so raw, so honest, so scarred that it becomes heavenly divine by design. It’s graffiti that outgrew childhood schemes, romance that cracked open a can of paint on steel, and trauma that learned how to smile for a crew photo.

After 25 years, I treat gallery walls like concrete walls I did graffiti on.

Because my ART never asked to be accepted.

It just refused to be forgotten.

Randy L. Barton

Aka Randy Boogie