Into The Vault - A documentary film by Christopher Thomas, 2024. Available on Youtube here.
‘The Unconscious Artist’ - Masterclass Interview with Christopher Bucklow by Brennan Backs, 2018. Available on Youtube here.
Christopher Bucklow: The Guests - Interview with Installation Magazine, 2013. Available here.
Christopher Bucklow - Interview by Toshidama Gallery, 2014. Available here.
Christopher Bucklow Guest - Interview with GUP Magazine, 2017. Available below:
Chris Bucklow: Illuminated - Interview with Fixe Magazine, 2012. Available below:
Walk me through a day in your life.
We have young kids so the day starts early when our youngest gets into bed and starts beating us up. If I have had a dream, and if I have the chance in the ensuing fracas, I try write it down quickly before we get out of bed. After we've taken the kids to school I walk a few minutes to my studio in the centre of town. If I'm having a photography day I might drive to another studio that I have out of town on a hill from where I can see the sun rise and set -- both of which are necessary for my photographic work. If I'm having a painting day then I'm in town and I might have coffee with a painter friend before I get down to work. Every day is unique and important. If we live the biblical span of "Three score years and ten" we will live about 25,000 days. I've already lived 20,000 days. This is not good! It spurs me to get going ...and to keep going. Lucky I am not religious…
What inspires you the art you create?
I don't know. It wells up from some source far below the 'me' that seems to be writing this to you now. Everyday consciousness is a circumscribed little globe in a sea of dreams. Dreaming goes on all day below the level of consciousness. Waking is the erecting of a thin membrane-wall that more or less cuts 'us' off from the unconscious for the length of the day. But the unconscious is all around us, all the time. To me this conscious me is like a small sun orbiting a supermassive black hole which it is normally oblivious of. That 'black hole' is the source of my creativity. It is not part of 'this' universe and I can never know what it is or where it come from. All I can do is watch what it gives me in my studio - and not only in my studio.
What is the earliest memory that propelled you to create?
Seeing Alfred Sisley's 'Floods at Port Marly' reproduced in a book when I was about 13. I saw something that accorded to the state of my 'soul' at that time. That painting is like Venice suddenly happening in the suburbs of Paris. The wide open space of the flooded Seine, a building surrounded - circumscribed - by water, illuminated by a great grey, faintly melancholy sky. I wanted to be a painter after this. I didn't know it then, but that meant that I wanted to deposit my 'soul' into images with which I could communicate with other people.
Tell us a little bit about your creative process.
I produce work - often with some sense of purpose and knowledge of what I think it is about. Then I reflect on it. And often I see things that I didn't know I was doing. So the work is like a symptom, and the reflection is like becoming 'doctor'. The results of the ‘consultation’ lead to new works, again they will contain unconscious as well as conscious contents. I reflect upon them and the whole process ratchets up in a feedback cycle. Often I paint a room or a space and I wait for one of the people who are part of my cast of characters to 'come in'. Then they suggest who they are with and what they are doing. And so the painting begins. The cast of characters was first established in the choices of people I used for my photography series 'Guest'. They are all people I have dreamed of.
How do you wish for your art to transform the world?
Perhaps the world would be a different place if people understood themselves more fully.
Tell us about a personal proud moment in the art world.
When I began to make work, becoming 'successful' was the natural appetite of a young man. It goes with the stage of life. Selling my first works to a museum didn't make me proud, but it did give me the confirmation I was looking for then. And I was pretty excited. Later in life one doesn't value that external confirmation. Nowadays, a painting finished, a painting that I get a buzz from -- that is a good moment. And it is private. A private moment in the art world.
Do you feel people are born creative or is it learned?
My goodness, we are so creative as children. I watch my kids with great pleasure, doing such brilliant drawings. I could cry with envy! It is innate. We adults are just as creative, but it is channeled into other areas of life -- such as creating our sense of our personal world being an hospitable place psychologically. We create a whole world of fantasy that allows us to live without too much fear etc etc. I sometimes worry about this thing about 'artists' . It sometimes feels to me that a fear of the potential radical creativity of ALL human individuals is why society corals the creativity within individuals that it calls 'artists', and that these people are then the only people allowed to create. What that does is manage the radical creativity of us all by making us think that only 'artists' have got it. To me that is sad.
Do you feel that there are limitations to what you want to create?
Yes, it is limited by my universe. However, when you find another 'universe', and you begin to communicate with that person as well as one can do across the great complex 'n-dimensional' confusing space between two 'universes', then one's limits are stretched and you become wider.
Do you feel art is vital to survival and if so, why?
Yes it is vital. As a niche in the great organism of humanity, the role 'artist' has been conserved as an activity over the ages. Within the evolutionary process, something unnecessary always withers and dies. Art in the past century has just become more and more central. It is growing. The great cathedrals of art - MoMA, the Tate, to name just two - have completed new buildings and continue to expand. Visitors flock there in huge crowds. Yes, it must be vital to our society. Personally it is vital for me too. Why, I do not entirely know. It feels like love, involuntary, primal.
Tell us a secret, an obsession.
The Anima, Philip Guston, The Mars Volta.