New York City Art Scene
Randy Steele
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"Ellen Schefler ©," a recently completed original done with pastel, about 15" x 22" unframed, rendered on a sheet of Canson Mi-Teintes rag paper, Steel Gray, using a mix of soft pastel brands, mostly Rembrandt, and NuPastel hard pastel. Some detail work rendered with CarbOthello pastel pencil. A light coat of Lascaux fixitive was applied. Much of my work is sourced from black-and-white photographs I shot in my hometown in Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania for a college art class about 50 years ago. All the colors are, therefore, imagined.

Posted in New York City Art Scene
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Courtney LangmoreSep 19, 2026

Tunkhannock fifty years ago, all those imagined colors now. What a journey this piece took to get here.

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Randy SteeleSep 19, 2026

Thank you Ms. Langmore. Yes, 50 years is a long time, but really for me, it feels like last week.

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Bill RichardsSep 19, 2026

I love that you're pulling from photographs you shot fifty years ago in your hometown. There's something really special about revisiting those places through memory and imagination. Ellen Schefler has such presence.

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Randy SteeleSep 19, 2026

Thank you, Mr. Richards. Yes, I truly enjoy mining my old negatives and prints looking for subjects that may work as paintings.

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Shannon CreminSep 18, 2026

The imagined color palette here is doing something brilliant, it's making the pastel work feel like memory rather than documentation. That steel gray foundation must be holding everything together beautifully, letting the color choices sit like they've been there all along instead of arriving as decoration. There's a warmth to how you've decided what stays muted and what gets pushed, and it shows in the final piece. Shooting those source photographs 50 years ago and choosing the colors now is its own kind of time travel.

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Kristofer CorwinSep 18, 2026

The imagined color from a black-and-white source fifty years later, that's its own kind of memory work. The steel gray paper as the starting surface makes sense for that, holding the original tone underneath. What made you choose this particular frame to pull forward after all this time?

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