Randall McCabe was born in Philadelphia in 1953. He attended school at The University of Pennsylvania and at the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington (B.F.A. 1983). After moving to Houston, Texas in 1984 and for the next twenty years his artwork sought to find a balance between our most primal impulse to make marks as humans and that point just shy of rational and premeditated artifice. In this interest, and intrigued by the possible affinities between our anthropological and biological infancies, his paintings and drawings drew inspiration from the art on paleolithic cave walls and from the drawings of very small children. And while his imagery over these years was primarily figurative and autobiographical, his formal sources have always come from the landscapes of west Texas.
McCabe has been exhibiting his work since the mid-80's showing principally in Texas. He hung his first solo show in 1995 and since then has shown regularly in Houston and throughout Texas. His solo shows include The Museum of East Texas, The Cornish College, and Rice University. He has been a resident artist at both the UCROSS and Ragdale Foundations and counts among his private commissions a 500 sq. ft. mural in Anchorage, Alaska. He is a veteran of the United States Navy Submarine Service and since 1997 has worked as the shop supervisor for the Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts at Rice University in Houston.
'Extract from a Scroll' 2005