As Directly as the Bird Sings
One might say that anyone can show us his labours and demand sympathy for the sweat of his brow, but only a master can shrug it all off and have us unquestioningly believing him. Klein has a rare spirit - Rarely rarely comest thou, O Spirit of Delight - and believes in livening us up rather than dragging us down.
Some artists have to labour long and hard to translate their ideas into sculptural form. The results are not always bad, but they always retain a certain heavy, mechanical quality.
How much better to be like Randy Klein, who seems to think in sculptural terms as easily and directly as the bird sings.
No doubt a lot of art is concealed in his art, but there in no mistaking the essential ease with which he approaches the medium: as soon as he begins to model, people and actions spring to life.
The directness with which his fingers work sometimes belies the complexity of his ideas. Often there is a well thought out mythical programme to his work: understandably, since he has long been fascinated by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the notion of change in progress inspires his most vivd pieces.
But the instinctive response seems to come first, then the thinking along and interacting with the physical fashioning of the sculpture.
Often Klein’s works seem to be a by-product of his sheer delight in movement and its immediate effects on the body.
Some of his works are about something fairly complex and explicable in literary terms: most of them are nothing but the joy of being a sculptor.
It is hard to believe that this is not the best possible way for sculpture to be.

John Russell Taylor

Big Art from the Big Man
Someone who has been at the very heart of many inner city regeneration projects and a creator of some quite amazing street art has been artist Randy Klein, and it is this man who has been chosen to beautify the entrance of Nunhead Station with one of his iconic works.

I went along to Klein's studio to talk to him about his work and the Nunhead project and found him lugging large pieces of steel - apparently his favoured medium. I expect all creative people to be enthusiastic about their work but nothing can prepare you for the passion and fire that emanates from this artist

Randy Klein is a big man with a big personality and works big as well. His creations arch over school gates, welcome you at park entrances and brighten dilapidated estates. He makes big steel men and paints them in colours of the countryside so that they overlap the urban and the rural; his landscape paintings have a touch of the architect or engineer about them so, understandably, he can't seem to define himself: 'I am a painter who sculpts and a sculptor who paints.' He tries to explain.

Randy Klein hails from Coney Island, the seaside away-day for New Yorkers, and the nostalgia he feels for his hometown is mirrored in a lot of his work.  He still has the accent but now it is peppered with south east London vowel sounds that nudge incongruently up against his own.

As Randy Klein talked me through the work that sits around the studio ready for his next gallery show he tells me that he likes the street art most: 'People may buy one of my paintings at an exhibition and that's it, no one sees it anymore except the buyer and his family, but with something at a park or a school it is seen by thousands!'

Michael Holland