Saturday, 11 October - Chris Bucklow
They Call it Art Afterwards
I tend to think of my paintings as data, rather than as art. Like dreams, they provide information about the psyche. It’s only later that they get called ‘art’.
This talk will be about my use of daydreaming, or Active Imagination, to produce images. I start each canvas without a plan, and the painting becomes a story that grows in the telling. After many years of working in this way, patterns and themes emerge, such as the recovery of a primordial, non-verbal language; a language of things rather than words. As in dreams, internal entities are personified as characters, places and objects.
I have recorded my dreams since 1986. The whole sequence of 688 dreams were published in the book ‘Nantucket Sleighride’ in 2017, along with an interpretive essay exploring the major themes. I will talk about how the nightdreams and the daydreamed paintings speak of similar things, and appear to have the same teleological aim, but that each uses a different lexicon of symbolic objects.
Chris Bucklow started to make art when he was thirty-two, after a significant dream. Prior to that he was an art historian and curator at the V&A Museum in London, where he specialised in Romantic Period prints and drawings, including William Blake. Bucklow’s artworks can be seen in many museum collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum, all located in New York. Chris’s long conversations about his paintings with the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in 2003 were published in the book ‘If This Be Not I’ (British Museum, 2004). Copies will be available at the talk.
Chris has also written several books exploring the underlying metaphorical languages of artists including Philip Guston (Wordsworth Trust, 2007) and Francis Bacon (Thames and Hudson, 2019). He has been awarded residences at The Banff Centre, Alberta; The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere and the British Museum, London.
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