Paul Randall
Studebaker Manual Cover Illustration -- 1945 Edition
Oil on Canvas
19 x 25 inches
Signed Lower Left
— This painting was featured in our weekly email on 1/6/17 along with the following gallery comments: K, this is a yarn… Last year a guy (actually, a guy’s kid) did a google search and turned me up as buying Indiana art and works by Paul A. Randall. The typical way things start. He forwarded me an image (below) It was interesting but of course totally different than the Randalls that have been in the marketplace. I knew that Randall had done some commercial illustration. The signature looked pretty consistent. And it was a great painting so I bought it. The restoration was slow and very technical. The result was beautiful! And we proceeded to frame it and hang it. I needed research as to what year Randall painted it. But I knew that Randall passed away (quite suddenly) in 1933 so I had this as a c. 1932 illustration. A couple different car guys were in the gallery, we talked about the painting and they’re like, ‘yeah, 1940s truck.’ And I’m all like, ‘psssht, Randall died in ’33 so it’s some ‘30s truck’. I began one of these Friday missives writing all about this great Paul A. Randall oil illustration. Needing to square the year, I set out to research and find the truck. Or at least the vintage. As in: google-->1930s trucks-->images. The car guys were right! Go figure! Googling 40s trucks got me closer. But that created a critical failure. My Paul A. Randall of Richmond and Indianapolis died in 1933. He couldn’t have painted a c. 1940s truck. Crap. I abandoned my totally cool Paul A. Randall feature for that Friday, that wasn’t a ‘Paul A. Randall’ at all. And initiated plan B -- writing about something else. I had a big problem – this great painting that I doted over for weeks wasn’t what I thought it was at all! In fact, now I had no idea what it was. It was shelved for several more weeks. I finally retuned, knowing it wasn’t my guy, Paul A. Randall. It was ‘Paul Randall’. Common name but no other correlating artistic listing. No nothing on ‘Paul Randall’. Back to google in search of some site that could do a reverse image search. I found Tineye.com. Free, easy. I uploaded my Randall image and lo, back came an image of the Studebaker manual and it links me to a few Ebay sellers offering original copies. Tineye opened everything up. What we have before us is an illustraton for a 1945 Studebaker truck manual. Halleujah. While I got my answer as to what the art was created for (Studebaker), we’re still left not knowing anything about ‘Paul Randall’. Maybe he was an in-house artist? I’m surprised an in-house artist would sign a work like this. While the man ‘Paul Randall’ remains unknown, his painting is right here – a bright an shining sun completely put back together. As a friend said, ‘It’s Lassie meets the Waltons all at once!’.
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