Lip Service

July 1st, 2010

The surreal fantasy of Julia Randall’s hyper-realistic drawings

Words Ali Gitlow Art Julia Randall

Looking at Julia Randall’s insanely rendered coloured pencil drawings of tongues, headless dolls, and Rococo wigs, it’s easy to be distracted by her flawless technique. Subtle creases in a lower lip, stray strands of wispy hair, and gleaming spit bubbles are captured in perfect detail, seemingly more realistic than the naked eye can see.

The 42-year-old Wesleyan University professor finds it humourous that people often remark on her work as being true to life, wowed by how accurately she’s depicted any given object or body part. “It’s kind of ironic, because clearly a lot of my drawings operate in the realm of fantasy – they’re not objects that exist. I’m using my technique as a way to persuade the viewer that they could possibly exist,” she explains. She’s also quick to note that the work doesn’t fall under the banner of realism either, since she draws things in more painstaking detail than is possible to perceive. “I guess I’m using a hyper-realistic technique to give that surrealistic feeling to the images,” she clarifies.

In 2003, Randall was working on a large drawing of a wheel of fortune covered in tongues based on a Brueghel painting – “like a cunnilingus machine” – when she became frustrated with how the tongues were turning out. “My husband said, ‘Why don’t you do studies of your own mouth? Take a sidebar and learn how to draw them more persuasively, then go back and fix the drawing,’” she recalls.

The pair set up a mirror and light source so Randall could make faces at herself. She soon switched to Macro lens photography to pick up minute details of her mouth, and so she could try out more difficult poses. “I wanted to use moisture and spit bubbles, and there’s just no way to hold a spit bubble for three weeks, I’m sorry. You gotta eat, right?” she says, chuckling.

Pleased with the results, she decided to turn these renderings into a standalone series, Lick Line, which was exhibited at Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York City in early 2004. As she began to excel at this type of drawing, Randall noticed the way spatial games played out within the work in a way she hadn’t anticipated. “The cavity of the mouth started to function like a puncture in pictorial space, and it was like [the tongue] was reaching out into the viewer’s space. There was something really visceral about it, and at the same time kind of funny, like a drawing is sticking its tongue out at you.”

After conquering the coloured pencil, Randall took her images of tongues and mouths to the next level, melding them with additional organic and inorganic imagery that coalesced into a series called Decoys and Lures in 2007. In “Decoy 1,” twigs emerge from a lush open mouth covered by a glistening spit bubble; a portal to outer space appears to lie just beneath this moist surface. A butterfly and moths flap about nearby, and a hummingbird yanks at one of the twigs, all atop trompe l’oeil stains and tears. She knows it’s easy for people to be seduced by such technically proficient work, but that this can’t be the sole driving force behind her drawings. For Randall, “The technique has to be in the service of the concept.”

Her latest work has taken a new tone, with Randall adding more complete human forms to images like “Popped,” which features the confounding combo of a female figure reflected in a pool of water in which floats what appears to be a Ken doll’s head. To create this, she used a model to draw the face, studied dolls in her studio, compiled photos of reflections, and even filled a wheelbarrow with water to perfect it. With these drawings, Randall cobbles together disparate visual elements, ultimately convincing viewers to suspend their disbelief. “Is it a boy, is it a doll, is it a mannequin, is it a plaything, is he a victim, is he sleeping, is he post-orgasmic?” Whatever the case, she succeeds in conveying opposing sensibilities, hinting at the complex emotional layers that exist between people. “I really like if it’s discomforting,” she admits. “I like the intersection of the erotic, the grotesque, something that’s both beautiful and perhaps a little cruel.”