Randy L. Estes aka Wizard dba Randy2Wear/Ready2WearAbleART

 Randy L. Estes, Raconteur is a daedalian* and multipotentialite* Renaissance Man & Wizard in the making who grew up in Fisher, a small farm town in East-Central Illinois, about 20 miles NW of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  If anyone has ever heard of Fisher, it is because its high school mascot is, “the Bunnies”.

A major defining and life altering event of Randy’s life occurred on October 16, 2010, when the neighbor living below him in his vintage Chicago 6 flat co op apartment, started what would become a 5 Alarm fire, destroying Randy’s apartment and its contents – his life’s possessions.  The 4 and a half year long aftermath of that fire was more hellish than the fire itself.  When he moved to Cedar Rapids, IA to start over, he didn’t realize he was leaving the fire trauma to replace it with an inland hurricane Derecho on August 10, 2020, 10 years later.

Randy is convinced that he is the real-life gentile version of George Kastanza from TV’s Seinfeld, and has myriad stories, witnesses, and former psychotic neighbors to provide empirical evidence to support the validity of this assertion, including a physician at University of Iowa Hospital who asked him in 2021, “Mr. Estes, who did you piss off in a former life?!”. 

As a multipotentialite, In addition to 20+ year career in Continuing Medical Education (CME), educating physicians, Randy has dabbled in many art forms over his lifetime from: drawing and acrylic painting; floral design; woodworking and furniture refinishing; cooking and baking; storytelling; fiber arts-crocheting, knitting, and most recently weaving. 

Randy’s current art form is using clothing as his canvas.  The genesis came from painting the walls of his various homes, unintentionally getting paint on his clothes, when the light bulb went off, “What if I INTENTIONALLY got paint on my clothes, yet in a random organic manner?”  For years it was T-Shirts, and tank tops.  About 5 years ago, he found a long black heavy cotton duck coat at a resale shop and thought, “That’d be a great canvas to “Jackson Pollock!”  And so it began.  With every new home painting project new colors got added, as well as colors from previous paint jobs.  He refers to this coat as the “OG GOAT Coat”. He continuously received comments/compliments as well as people offering to buy it   when wearing it out in public.  Randy’s BBFF (Bearded Best Friend Forever) Tim Gallenbeck-The Bearded Border Etch-A-Sketch Artist & American Ninja Warrior contestant began telling him, “Dude, you need to start making these and selling them!”  So he did.  The rest is history in the making.

The Wizard’s art follows one of his tenets of life, “REpurpose, REcycle, REcreate, from the clothing to the paint. The paint used is cast-off, throwaways, or mistints.  NEVER mixed new off the shelf.
When asked to describe his art, The Wizard replies, “Think Jackson Pollock meets Ralph Lauren & Calvin Klein. The Wizard is now expanding his art to utilize furniture (solid and upholstered), and residential and commercial walls and ceilings as his blank canvases.

Summer of 2023 became the year.  Why then? After a few years of crappy health issues and myriad (7) unrelated surgeries, he needed another creative outlet in between surgeries and recoveries.  The continuous prodding of “You should do this!”From Tim and others reverberated in his ADHD- addled brain. In July he had his Thyroid (whom he named Theobaud) removed (Surgery #8).  It turned out that Theoabaud was cancerous.  It also turns out that slinging paint when you’re pissed off at cancer is mentally therapeutic, a great distraction, and joy inducing.  What better reaction to cancer could there be?  For him, this was it. In October, Randy once again heard the words, “This has never happened with one of my patients!”, from his latest surgeon in the game of Medical Specialty BINGO, when the carpal tunnel surgery on his Right Hand did NOT go as planned.  Just WHO did he piss of in a former life?!
#fuckcancer

Daedalian
From Daedalus, the legendary craftsman and inventor of Greek mythology. The term “daedalian” refers to someone who is ingenious, creative, and highly skilled—especially in multiple crafts or problem-solving. It suggests complexity, brilliance, and innovation.