Interview
Mark Randall
65
What were your early interests? Were you introduced to visual art at a young age?
Actually not at all. When I was growing up as a kid I was really immersed in music. My mother really pushed all of us kids to getting into music. I started playing the French horn in 5th grade, and I sort of stuck with it all the way to college. I just thought, “Oh well, I’ll just become a classical musician.” I went to the University of Washington because they had a really good music department, and they had a really renowned French horn teacher. And after a couple of years, I realized that while I loved playing the instrument, the kind of petty and competitive nature of the classical music world sort of took the fun out of it for me. I thought, “I’m not enjoying this; I don’t know that I want to spend the rest of my life doing this.” So I started flipping through the college catalog and looked at classes that I thought would be interesting to try. So I tried physical anthropology and museum studies; I did classes in forestry. I was all over the map. And there was this evening design class that I thought might be fun. So I took it, and I really liked it. The teacher was really encouraging. She said, “you know, you have a real ability. There’s a really good design program here; you should look into it.” And I did, and the rest of it is history. I just started from this one evening design class and followed this path through the program and ended up out the other end as a designer. So, in a way it was kind of arbitrary.
So you graduated from the design program there?
Yeah, with a B.F.A.. They have a five-year program there, which actually is pretty rigorous. I think it’s a really good program. They way the program starts is, in the fall they have four classes, so there’s like a hundred students that start in the fall. At the end of that semester, they cut that in half, so there are fifty. And then the fifty students do a class in the spring semester, which is then cut in half. And so those twenty-five students are the ones who get to enter the program. When I had taken my first drawing class, I had never drawn anything. I wasn’t very good, and at the end of the