Deborah Buck: More is More by Terri Sultan; 2022
Deborah Buck thinks and makes in layers: layers of meaning, of things, of materials, and as a result, the depth and breadth of her visual representations are intensely physical. Populated with any number of animistic figures, emblematic signs and symbols, and intricate, expressive ornamentation, her paintings are expressionistic manifestations of the inner workings of her imagination.
Her method mediates the Surrealist notion of automatism—to make art without conscious thought, accessing material from the unconscious mind as part of the creative process. This isn’t to say that Buck doesn’t think about what she paints, in fact each work has its own intricate backstory derived from captured moments of a dream or memory, current events, or a phrase or image that flashes through her mind as she’s working. These coalesce as frameworks that remain largely unseen and unknown to the viewer. Her inspirations are manifold: the weird and fanciful stories in Lewis Carroll’s 1865 masterwork Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the ominous sides of the many old German folk songs, epics, and tales that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm compiled and published between 1812 and 1857 as Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and her own childhood, spent largely alone and filled with imaginary friends and places to go. Regarding her most recent body of work, I was reminded of the fairies (the fictional phasmids that assist and comfort the heroine) and the monsters (the faun, the pale man with no eyes) in Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 masterpiece, Pan’s Labyrinth. Like del Toro’s creatures, Buck’s birds, horses, insects, flowers, and fantastical humanoids are freighted with allegorical, historical, social, and political references. And like the protagonist in Pan’s Labyrinth, Buck’s heroines (and they are almost always recognizably female) are about finding the maneuvers to stand strong against the dangers and evils of the world.
Buck thinks of her paintings as “figurescapes” a word she uses to refer to how her subjects occupy her picture plane—frontal, with little or no perspectival compositional space to reference scale or to shape a definable sense of place. This notion of figurescape also applied to her preferred dimension: slightly off square measuring 51 inches by 45 inches, a size she says, “is her wingspan,” and that reflects the decidedly visceral nature of her methodology. She prefers paper—specifically 300-pound Arches hot pressed—for its innate luster and ability to carry multiple layers of acrylic washes, dense black ink, and overlays of pastel, a technique that creates a sensation akin to looking into a clear body of water activated by striations, reflections, and pentimenti. Sumi ink, a relatively new addition to her material toolbox, allows her to form fine lines on top of bold paintbrush strokes, bringing figures forward and pushing the background back. “When I’m drawing with the ink into the paint and the pastel, I already know what the narrative will be, then I can play,” she told me. And play she does, in a free-wheeling and very primeval way. The surfaces of her paintings are flurries of accident and control, created through sfumato, broad brushstrokes, and boldly emphatic line drawings of personages that sometimes seems like caricatures, but always embodying or conveying humor that is decidedly dark. Like Philip Guston’s lexicon of architypes that range from one-eyed portrayals of the artist in the studio to the hooded Ku Klux Klan figures, Buck’s characters couch serious themes in the visual language of cartoons.
Buck often tackles challenging social matters: climate change, social injustice, gun violence, and the psychological impact of the COVID global pandemic. All this is spontaneously worked out each time she picks up her brushes to work, asking herself, she told me, “who are these characters and what are they doing?” Her approach is both corporeal and intellectual, as she seeks to address a particular topic that is occupying her while retaining an open-ended narrative, working through the composition while simultaneously defining a title to provide a conduit into her thought process. For example, in Horse Thieves from 2021, the underlying concept was about property: who owns it, how is it distributed? The central character, the yellow horse sporting a filagree forelock, decorative necklace, and red cowboy boots is flanked by totemic characters, one whose arms are outstretched, the other armless like the Venus di Milo, are set in an atmospheric landscape of sky and field. The imagery here, as in all her paintings, emerges in what she describes as a “fugue or tantric state” as she uses the actual act of making to find the painting’s focus, while inviting the viewer to create their own interpretations. What does Horse Thieves express? Fundamentally, is it a disquisition on the nature of property and ownership, not only real property, but also the global sociological question of the rights of women, immigrants, and the dispossessed. Buck acknowledges the dichotomy between her highly decorated, vibrantly colored scenario and the emotional impact of her subject, saying definitively, “there is nothing cute about this painting.”
Put That Thing Away from 2021 started out as a story about Helen of Troy and the Trojan Horse before morphing into a contemporary commentary on heightened gun violence and her wish and hope that women take a stance against aggression. The hollow-bodied Trojan Horse became a tank with guns, and Helen of Troy morphed into a contemporary woman warrior. Female heroes throughout history are an abiding interest to Buck, and she consciously depicts her figures as actors of power or resistance. Her take is couched in highly feminine colors and gestures: the overall pink palette that permeates the picture plane like cotton candy, the ballet skirt and tiara, and even the decorative filigree of the tank contradict her point. The background in Put That Thing Away is an atmospheric haze that moves from softly subtle pink to gray to blue, backstopping a plethora of filigree that defines the standing figure on the left with her yellow-gloved hands, fingers stretched out wide, signaling caution, and the wheeled armament on the right that looks for all the world like a layered wedding cake. A similar form dominates Birthday in a Bell Jar from 2020: the bright red and pink ornately filigreed confection decorated with eyes and roses is set under the golden dome of the jar, situated in the stormy atmosphere of thunderclouds. This is Buck at her decorative, highly feminine and feminist best, and shows the influence of one of her most treasured research tools, Henry Shaw’s The Encyclopedia of Ornament, first published in 1842, that has pride of place in her studio. Here, though, the reference to the bell jar also conjures up associations with the renowned confessional poet and feminist writer Silvia Plath, her talent, her struggles, and her premature death. Since Buck’s titles come to her as she’s working, and in part influence the direction a painting might take, it’s hard to glean exactly the direction she is seeking to broadcast to her viewers, or even to herself. Her odd juxtapositions call to mind the banner phrase penned by the nineteenth-century French poet known as the Comte de Lautréamont, “as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table,” which became the foundational doctrine of the Surrealists movement. It is this notion of objective chance that largely governs Buck’s art making. See No, Speak No, Hear No Evil from 2021, is about just this sort of imaginative collision. The three characters reference the ancient Japanese depiction of three monkeys—one covering its eyes, one covering its ears, and the third covering its mouth—representing the Buddhist teachings of the importance of avoiding evil, which has, over time, taken on a more contemporary and less elevated definition of ignoring bad behavior by pretending to not see it. In Buck’s version, these contradictions are further complicated by the introduction of the snake head and slithering pink tongue (she calls it the snake from the Garden of Eden), and the cultural references implied by the emblematically crowned triumvirate.
Many of Buck’s compositions revolve around the number three: the aesthetic theory of the rule of thirds, derived from the mathematical relationship of the Golden Ratio of ideal proportions; the dynamics of the three levels of conversation—informational, emotional, and relational; and the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity defining god as existing in three coequal divine persons. Building on this triangle of references provides her with balance and rhythm on the picture plane, underscores her quest to elicit deep levels of connection and intimacy, and is essential to understanding how she thinks, sees, and communicates her own intentions. Perhaps the strongest metaphor for Buck’s artistic enterprise, however, is the spiritual tradition of the mystical third, or mind’s eye, signifying perception beyond ordinary sight. This is an icon that appears frequently in her work: an all-seeing eye peering out, inviting us to actively engage in our powers of perception, awareness, and even spiritual communication, to appreciate and revel in the power of beauty while recognizing undercurrents of concern. Her bricolage compositions, created out of whole cloth and powered by her ingenuity, speak volumes.
Protean Paintings: Several Thoughts on Deborah Buck’s New Work by Gregory Volk
In his great 1844 essay The Poet, transcendentalist poet-philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson had a really unusual and, for the time, radical thing to say about art and art making. “Art,” he declared, “is the path of the creator to his work,” and while he was referring to poetry he could just as well have been referring to any other medium, for instance painting. This declaration is at first so seemingly casual and understandable that one could easily miss its full complexity and implications. In a compact ten words the visionary Emerson shifted focus from the finished artwork—and in his day just about every reader would have understood art as the finished poem, sculpture, or painting—to the artist, and specifically the artist’s “path”; to her or his quest and discoveries, insights and intuition, development and knowledge (which is often very different from knowledge elsewhere). That’s worth considering when it comes to the explorative, transformative, and deeply inquiring new paintings (all on paper) of Deborah Buck, and in viewing these paintings, as well as through conversing with the artist, I have the distinct impression that she is really living, as opposed to simply making, these works. With Buck in mind, Emerson’s declaration can be updated: art is the path of the creator to her (my emphasis) work and I’d also like to underscore that, for me, by far the most significant and exciting development in contemporary art during my time in the art world, dating to the early 1990s, has been the rise of female artists, which is unprecedented in all of Western art history.
While Buck has long been an accomplished, albeit often under-recognized, artist—as a young woman she was singled out and championed by Clyfford Still, who personally supported her for a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture—she has juggled her art with the demands of being a highly successful businesswoman, as well as a patron of the arts and art institutions. Over the last several years she has renewed her devotion to painting, and now she has emerged with a striking new body of work that is very fresh and eventful. Her new paintings scramble distinctions between representation and abstraction, freely mix painting with line drawing (for some works Buck uses black sumi ink, a luscious material derived from vegetable oil soot, which has really energized her paintings and taken them in a new direction), and often, in a peculiar way, seem at once antic and very, very thoughtful; they also feel just so “alive,” so crackling with keen thought and spirit. Buck’s combinatory approach to these paintings is wonderfully idiosyncratic. Her touch can be really fine and exquisite, but also willfully unruly—all surging energy. Erasure is important and Buck builds up her paintings in multiple layers. Delicate drawn marks mesh with bold painted forms. Glitter, with all its girlish and joyful connotations, is used sparingly, but with pronounced effect. Both colorful —Buck is an adept and ardent colorist—and more muted abstract parts mix with recognizable images (among them a whimsical elephant, eyes, fruit, and birds) and other forms that just barely hint at representation. What results are protean paintings that seem like eccentric, ever-metamorphosing mini-worlds or vibrant environments.
Two Tone (2016) shows a curving, bulging, loosely diamond shaped form in the middle; half of this form is rich crimson and the other half is soft pink. While fundamentally abstract, it abounds with possible connotations, from the female body (and implicit female sexuality) to marine life, sacred symbols, various kinds of architectural ornamentation, and even luxurious fabrics. A hallmark of Buck’s new paintings is how her vivid images are so suggestive, and this has to do with the eclectic information and enthusiasms that she brings to each work, born from what she calls a life of, “paying attention.” Curving lines drawn with ink ripple from top to bottom of this central form, while proliferating light gray scallop shapes (a signature shape for Buck, which appears in many paintings) accumulate around it. A welter of gray marks and shapes, including slight lines, smudges, streaks, and others hinting at both architectural structures and land formations surround the form, but also seem half-disappearing, as if you are seeing them through mist, or as if they are barely legible traces of the remote past. From some perspectives this painting is pure matte, but from others it is surprisingly glossy, even bedazzling; for all their immediate dynamism Buck’s paintings can be quite subtle and they reward patient, sensitive viewing. An important thing to know is that Buck did not begin this riveting painting with an end result in mind; this carries through to most of her other new paintings as well. Instead she starts from something basic—like the rhythmic and repetitive scallop shapes in this work—and then launches the painting from there, with acumen, but also with a real sense of openness and adventure. Buck’s process is intuitive and, as I wrote, explorative. She guides her paintings, certainly, but also lets them guide her, even in terms of discovering what the painting is really about, or wants to become. She doesn’t simply compose her paintings, but instead arrives at them, via an Emersonian “path” that includes instinct, concentrated thought, frank emotion, improvisation, and considerable risk.
Some of Buck’s paintings are downright voluptuous and revel in an organic sensuality, again with distinctly female connotations but also with many connections to the natural world. There is a vaguely oyster bed look to the looming black, white, and gray form in Sonar (2017)—and more on this painting in a minute—and a quasi sea creature look to the main form in Tiger Tales (2017). While Buck is hardly a painter of nature, her paintings are suffused with biomorphic forms and suggest an openness to, and felt connection with, the natural world—this from an artist who spends a lot of time a stone’s throw from the Atlantic Ocean. In Braid (2017), primarily abstract curving shapes in a cluster also hint at plump figs and mollusk shells. Part is deep red, another part is soft pinkish-beige, while abundant black marks are a vital force. The marvelous Her Lipstick Startled Me (2017) features some of what Buck has humorously called her “Easter colors.” Bright orange-red and magenta lips, drawn in ink and colored by paint, are linked in strands and course horizontally across the painting. References other than to human lips are also apparent: seashells, jewelry, vulvae. An over the top rendition of lipstick, which is a typically female signifier, this celebratory painting also has an air of unbridled fantasy and a look (somewhat) of full color Disney animated films, the kind that enchanted and transported Buck when she was a young girl, and have done the same for millions of others through the years.
Speaking of which: Passage to India (2017) shows fabulous creatures cavorting in mid-air next to a vertical structure that may be a human figure, or an exotic column, or perhaps a mix of both. The painting’s ground is a scruffy and smudgy, yet captivating, mix of grays, pinks, and blues. One of the creatures is an utterly endearing elephant, and one source for this painting is E.M. Forster’s acclaimed 1924 novel A Passage to India. Another important source is the Disney animated extravaganza Fantasia (1940), in which classical music summons a splendid and fantastical world of fairies, nymphs, sparkling flowers, magical bubbles, winged horses, cartoon people, ballerina hippos and dancing elephants, among others. It’s not that Buck quotes from or directly refers to this film. Instead, the film, and others of its ilk, inspires her, energizes her work, and connects with her own aspirations to make paintings that are all about transformation as a fundamental principle, all about inventing spectacular alternative worlds, and ultimately all about wonderment and freedom.
Deborah Buck is irrepressibly inventive when it comes to these alternative worlds, in paintings that are at once forceful and playful, forthright and occasionally mysterious. In Sonar, on a green ground, a dense cluster of Buck’s signature scallop shapes (with an oyster bed look) shares the space with what appears to be a red hot air balloon sending sonar beneath the sea and an ebullient, rainbow colored wheel. It’s pointless to try to rationally decipher precisely what is going on. Instead it is best to simply give oneself to this work and to enter Buck’s fanciful, through the looking glass world where oddities are commonplace and where the normal rules and behavior no longer apply.
This brings me to Buck’s most enduring influence, which is Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), in which a bored young girl, already tired of the routines and propriety of this world, falls down a rabbit’s hole to enter an ever-shifting alternative world full of anthropomorphic animals and marked by bafflement, delight, sometimes fear, and constant surprises. Buck doesn’t directly refer to the book. Instead its spirit, and its topsy-turvy, carnivalesque energies are pure nutrition for her paintings, in which familiar things become strange and eccentric, and startling scenes emerge from the mundane and known. The dark, seemingly levitating rabbit in Buck’s Velveteen Rabbit (2016), surrounded by agitated (yet gorgeous) yellow, pink, and gray areas and by a drawn cluster of what may be grapes but which also suggest breasts, bears little resemblance to the cute and cuddly stuffed bunny in the famous children’s book of the same title. Instead, it is an outlandish, even menacing force and you can’t take your eyes off it. The wacky, cartoonish creature (or is it creatures?) in Kiss (2016), in bright orange shorts, with a face that resembles a vertical mouth, or an eye, but that also sure looks like a vulva is also a powerful force emanating both desire and consternation. For all her interest in invented worlds, Buck also sometimes responds to this world, right now. The cartoonish, yet somber and wary, eyes and the frantic, upraised hands in Campaign (2016) are her taut response to the recent presidential election. In the acrylic, pastel, and charcoal on paper Blow Up (2006), a dark gray, bulbous structure, almost like some weird space vessel from science fiction, appears to be igniting for liftoff. The source here is gossip among friends that went terribly awry.
What you see in Deborah Buck’s paintings is of obvious importance: her prominent colors and eccentric imagery, all the evidence of her various and skillful techniques. Her paintings are, as I mentioned, eventful; a single painting can look at once elegant and ungainly, meticulous and rough-hewn. However, what you don’t literally see, but instead sense and feel, is of great importance too, and that’s all the fleet thought, memories, complex emotions, and deep feeling that suffuse these paintings and help make them so meaningful and compelling. What Emerson was really advocating long ago in his groundbreaking essay “The Poet” is a spirited, adventurous, risk-taking art capable of conveying the artist’s driving ideas while also elastically taking the shape of the artist’s own psyche. He was calling for an art revelatory of the artist’s particular consciousness—he memorably termed such an art and its effect “the science of the real”—and this seems like a very good description of what Deborah Buck is up to in her impressive new body of work.
Gregory Volk
Bucklandia by Lilly Wei
Deborah Buck confessed that she has always been intrigued by secrets and secret worlds, by the dark side of fairy tales such as Roald Dahl’s unorthodox but beloved stories, by sense and nonsense, by wit with bite. Lewis Carroll’s fanciful 1865 classic, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is one of her favorite books. It’s the slide down a rabbit hole into an unknown, destabilized, shape-shifting world that Buck responds to with glee, enraptured by the giddy changes in size of the heroine, the sartorially splendid White Rabbit, the grinning Cheshire Cat and all the other curious creatures and objects who are its denizens, the quick entrances and exits of everyone and everything, the dotty, upside down logic. It’s a surreal hustle and flow that is disconcerting, even menacing at times but also exhilarating. Secret worlds such as Wonderland have been the point of departure for Buck’s practice since the bold figurative paintings on canvas that she made in the 1980s with their noir/goth satires (skull-headed beauty queens, mummies) to the current rococo oil on paper paintings (and their abstract femme entourage). Buck’s cast of images are powdered with painterly maquillage, gussied up in glitter and feathers, shimmering with opalescent to high voltage colors, including turquoise, a shade she has appropriated as her own and uses with abandon. She calls it Buckhouse Blue and she treats it as a tonic, often adding it to her painting when she’s reached an impasse in her work.
Some of her other favorite things are the sugar Easter eggs that you peer into in order to see the tiny hills, flowers, baby rabbits inside, secret gardens of all kinds, ovoid shapes, vessels, such as the female body and heads—both hold an ultimate mystery. Buck also has an art and antiques gallery on the Upper East Side that is its own hothouse world. “As a woman,” she said, “I’ve done a lot of things that I wasn’t expected to do—like starting a business ten years ago but I find it as creative as being an artist, which I’ve been for the past thirty years. Frustrated by the isolation of the studio, it was important for me to go out into the world, especially after the birth of my son, which was so joyous. It’s important for me to do many things but the pictures inform everything else and all my decisions come from them, they are the inspiration.”
The recent work mostly depicts wrapped objects, conjuring delectable, feminized Christos in miniature, the exterior masked, de-familiarized, the interior concealed, eliciting conjecture. Shelf Life, 2010, is a wrapped beehive-like shape studded in bright red bits that turn out to be maraschino cherries. She wanted to suggest something that was scrumptious but also saccharine, sickly sweet, on the verge of spoiling, the delicious and the disgusting in balance with a message that is essentially about decay, about past, present and future states, a comic book Pop Surreal version of the theme of vanitas.
Buck injects her sense of humor into the work. One is called Duchess, 2010, the figure bedecked with pearls, the lips glittered, backed by a beautiful red ground. Another is Black and White, 2011, which suggests an abstract ballerina in a white tutu cupped by a large, stylized signature hand–or a flower or even an ostrich. Another is called Birthday, 2011, presenting a soft, plummy cake with a single lighted candle. Love Potion, 2011, is a green bottle pendant that suggests an Elsa Perretti form, emblazoned with a red cross, promising romantic aid—or a warning. Woman Dancing, 2010 features a tall, gowned cylindrical form that flares at the top, is fringed at the bottom and set into motion with a whirl of strings beaded at the ends. They are shards of femininity adorning what might also be seen as a cross-dressing phallus but Buck revels in mixed signals, mixed signifiers. Magnets also appear regularly in her work as forces of attraction and repulsion but no matter the image, all are painted with vibrato and panache, with fearless, lively brushwork.
Buck is comfortable with chick art and chick culture but does not view herself as particularly girlish although she refuses to go out without makeup, polished nails, spangled sandals and believes that lipstick can be curative. Her work is based on her deeply sensual response to the countless surfaces and textures of the world around her and its panoply of resplendent colors. For Buck, what she chooses as her themes are also an expression of control, of agency and it’s all woven together with her life. Politically, she is a New York left-leaning independent thinker. Culturally, she’s a downtown type who lives uptown. Her work, however, is a willful construct, and she likes to “go against type,” to go her own way. She says she can swear like a truckdriver and drink like a sailor and that’s one reason the very feminine part of her ends up in these paintings, in the pregnant shapes, the shining, baubled embellishments.
Clyfford Still initiated her into a life in art, an art career. Still and her father breakfasted at the same farm stand every morning for years where they would talk only about baseball. One day, her father asked the famously reclusive artist to look at her work and he agreed. Impressed by what he saw, Still arranged for Buck to go to Skowhegan in the summer of 1975 when she was 18. He said to her that she didn’t need to be taught to paint; she could do that already. Instead, she should learn everything she could about the world in order to inform her paintings. Buck considered it good advice, enrolling at a liberal arts college instead of art school and has never regretted it. She also worked for Walt Disney as an animator and designer. In a way, that was her art schooling. Among other skills, Buck learned how to make blueprints for huge displays and how to draw eight hours a day. She likened the process to playing scales on a piano and because of it, “my hand and eye became so much more disciplined. I’ve learned so much from that time. Disney cartoon figures often appear in my work, transformed—these hands,” she said, pointing to some hands in a painting, “could be Mickey’s hands only exaggerated.”
There is a remarkable continuity in Buck’s output, in her wrapped, ripening, morphing shapes with their inner secrets. The newest work seems even more exuberant, more assured, more fantastical and glamorous than ever, her sense of color, always heady, burns brighter. She starts these paintings by applying charcoal to paper, without a preconceived idea. The composition comes quickly but she wants to add more information, to “earn the image.” She does that almost as a sculptor might, freeing the figure from the material, from the paint and drawing, in her case. Buck layers the painting, then wipes the layer away, drawing on top of it with both delicacy and bravura, wiping that away, repeating the layering, refining, eradicating until it begins to acquire density, to tell her something. Only then is it resolved for her, often with little trace of its beginnings. “It’s the story of a process and what’s left,” she said, which also sounds like the story of most people’s lives.