Randy Freeman is good friends with a scrub jay. He’s cultivated a fond relationship with the bird, nicknamed Buddy, over the past five years. Buddy spots Freeman in his backyard, flies over to the artist’s side, and lands on his shoulder.
“I’ll reach in my pocket and hold a handful of peanuts out. He’ll take the one he wants, and off he goes,” Freeman told the Sun. “Somewhere along the line, a couple years or maybe three years ago, he decided that it would be more fun to take one out of my mouth. So he’ll sit on my hand, and he’ll pick through the peanuts. … He’ll stand real tall on my hand and stare into my eyes, and I’ll put a peanut between my lips, and he’ll take it out of my mouth.”
Art plus wine equals a good time
See Randy Freeman’s artwork at Flying Goat Cellars, located at 1520 E. Chestnut Court in Lompoc, through November. Visit the venue Thursday to Monday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. To inquire about commissioned pieces, call Freeman at (805) 260-3247.
Flying Goat is moving its tasting room to its winery at the end of the year, with a planned Jan. 2 launch at 1251 West Laurel Ave., Lompoc. Learn more at flyinggoatcellars.com.
When Freeman spoke to the Sun in late October, Buddy had flown away with a peanut that morning for the 709th time. Freeman keeps count.
This playful admiration for nature often shows up in Freeman’s artwork. He’s showing 13 such paintings at the Flying Goat Cellars tasting room in Lompoc through November. It’s the last exhibit at the Wine Ghetto site before the company moves the tasting room to the winery next year.
Hunting and fishing during his childhood in Iowa inspired Freeman’s enduring appreciation for the outdoors. He said at its core, his artwork is about life.
The artist starts each piece with the subject’s eyes. He sketches with a pencil, then takes out pastels working from the top of the page down.
“Pastels are a dry medium, and they’re dusty, especially when you blend them like I do,” Freeman explained. “I use Q-tips to blend the different layers of color into it until I get the texture I want and the color.”
Almost four decades ago, he rediscovered his passion for art. At that point, the last formal drawing classes he’d taken were in the seventh grade, but Freeman made many engineering drawings over what would become a 47-year career.
In 1988, he was temporarily located in Hawaii working on a radar upgrade, finding himself bored on his Sundays off. A friend who was an avid watercolorist took Freeman to buy drawing supplies at a stationery shop.
“In the back of the store, they had this huge collection of fine art materials and stuff. So instead of getting charcoals, I bought a collection of pastels and some colored charcoal paper, and I started doing pastels on them,” Freeman remembered. “I was trying to do landscapes because Hawaii is beautiful. There’s lots of things to see. And I hated it. I wasn’t happy with my effort.”
One day while he was waiting for his laundry to be done, the artist flipped through a magazine. The model for a hair dye advertisement caught his attention because of her “odd features,” he said, so Freeman created her portrait.
“When I got done with it, I put some highlights in her eyes and different places on her face. I stepped back, and I looked at it, and I said, ‘Hey, this works for me!’” Freeman said with a laugh. “So, I started doing pastel paintings and portraits.”
There are a handful of portraits at Flying Goat, including two of his friend Sandra, which took first place in the California Mid-State Fair and the Santa Barbara County Fair years ago.
He won blue ribbons every year at the fairs from 1989 to 1992 until an official at the Mid-State Fair told him he needed to enter in the professional division and accused him of using some sort of photographic trick.
Since then, Freeman decided to practice art for his own pleasure. He’s taken a few commissions over the years and is open to more in the future. He’d eventually like to start an online gallery and sell paintings through a website, but the selections he has at Flying Goat are up for sale in the meantime.
“It’s a feeling of accomplishment that I get out of [painting], the same feeling I got out of doing a good job in the engineering world. It’s this pride in my effort and the feeling of accomplishment when it’s finished,” Freeman said.
One of his favorite pieces is on display at the winery. His inspiration was a small postage stamp photo from an in-flight magazine on one of his trips to Hawaii. It depicted a Hawaiian woman in a red and yellow dress, and he really liked how the painting turned out even though it wasn’t his own composition.
Two self-portraits are at Flying Goat, too, which were assignments when he took life drawing classes at Allan Hancock College in 1990.
The rest of his artwork tends to focus on wildlife, especially birds.
“There’s a pair of wood ducks that are flying, a mated pair of wood ducks. They’re looking for a nest site,” Freeman explained about a piece called Morning Flight. “I have another one with a couple little wood duck chicks diving out of the nest hole in a tree, going down to the ground for their first swim.”
With the number of pictures Freeman has taken of Buddy the scrub jay, he’ll have ample material to work with if they lose contact.
“I’ll have plenty of paintings of him laying around,” the artist said.
When Freeman isn’t working with his pastels, he may be playing jazz music with his vintage horn collection, birding in his backyard, restoring an old Ford Mustang, or practicing Tai Chi, which is how he landed the gig at Flying Goat.
Winery co-owner Kate Griffith is a newcomer to the Lompoc Tai Chi scene, but Freeman and his wife have practiced for years.
“Where we do Tai Chi on Fridays is in a parking lot, and the way he whispers to the birds and has this connection with birds is amazing,” Griffith said. “He really is able to capture especially birds in his paintings.”
Flying Goat Cellars has featured local art in the tasting room almost from the beginning, but Griffith was happy to discover an artist new to her.
She said Freeman is a man of many talents.
“I’m thrilled. I’m amazed at the quality of his paintings,” Griffith said. “It’s amazing that that’s not something he’s been doing his whole life.”
Reach Staff Writer Madison White at mwhite@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in November 5 – November 12, 2026.
