Art Brood

Sons make their own spins off an inherited talent

By Janet Rems

Marco’s Wave particle sculpture, Guy’s wood inlay piece, Tony’s untitled oil on canvas (bottom) Courtesy of Rando family

Every family has a series of traits and abilities hardwired in their DNA. For Reston’s Rando family, it’s the ability to create art.

Patriarch Guy Rando and his three sons, Marco, Tony and Gaetano, are sharing their different ways of expressing that talent at a joint exhibition starting this month in the Jo Ann Rose Gallery at the Reston Community Center, Lake Anne Village Center.

Marco, the most voluble member of the clan, says preparing for a show generates a “wonderful energy, creativity and sharing.” Except for Gaetano, who lives in Boston, father and sons work together in a studio in the house Guy built at Lake Anne.

Though close, “we’re very different in what we’re interested in working on,” Tony says, sitting with his father and brother around a table at the Greater Reston Arts Center.

Guy, 72, who had a long, distinguished career as a landscape architect, is now creating on a smaller scale. For the show, Guy, looking every inch the patriarch and artist with his flowing gray hair and carefully trimmed Van Dyke-style beard and moustache, focused on two-dimensional abstract wood pieces done with inlays.

Tony, who works at the Diesel designer clothing store in Leesburg, says he’s “messing around” with his own form of printmaking and stencil art. With black goatee, carefully coifed Mohawk and dark sunglasses, he explains, “I’ve taken contemporary subject matter, some controversial, and used that, things iconic in culture.”

Known for his whimsical kinetic sculptures, Marco, a dark-haired, clean-shaven version of his father, says he’s recently developed an interest in quantum physics, how everything is interconnected. He wants to give those ideas life in Calder-influenced mobiles made with found materials.

Gaetano, 24, a Boston University graduate, is expected to exhibit oil paintings.

Growing up Randos, it was inevitable they would become artists, Marco and Tony say. Guy is a graduate of the Harvard School of Design and did post-graduate work in art and architecture at Columbia University. He studied landscape art and urban design in Rome under a Fulbright grant, when Marco was a toddler.

He worked on Reston’s Master Plan “when there was nothing here,” the sculpture garden at D.C.’s Hirshorn Museum and the sunken, stone sculpture garden for Chase Manhattan Bank in New York City with famed Japanese-American artist and landscape architect Isamu Noguchi.

As a result, Marco, who studied industrial design at Pratt, remembers always being surrounded by original art, talk of art and art books open everywhere.

“It was almost like growing up in a small gallery,” says Tony, who studied at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and has a fine arts degree from the Corcoran College of Art + Design in D.C.

Looking at his father, Tony quips, “He’s a work of art himself.”

Exhibit reception is Aug. 8, from 2 to 4 p.m. Dates are Aug. 3 through Sept. 8; 703-476-4500; www.restoncommunitycenter.com

(August 2009)