John Buck

JOHN BUCK
Born: Ames, Iowa, 1946
Last known address: 11229 Cottonwood Road, Bozemon, MT 59715 (in object file for “Return”). Currently divides his time between Hawaii and Montana.
Education: Kansas City Art Institute and School of Design, Kansas City, Missouri, B.F.A. 1964-68; University of California-Davis, Davis, California, M.F.A., 1970-72; Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting, Skowhegan, Maine, 1971; Gloustershire College of Art and Design, Cheltenham, England, 1972-73.
Public Collections: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Fine Arts Museums San Francisco, Yellowstone Art Center, Billings, MT, University Art Museum, Berkeley, Denver Art Museum, Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Brooklyn Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, Palm Springs Desert Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, Madison Art Museum, RAYOVAC Corporation, Madison, Wisconsin, Seattle Art Museum.
General info:
John Buck today remains a practicing artist, currently represented by the Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle and the Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in Chicago. He has held teaching positions around the United States and abroad, most notably at Montana State University, Bozeman, Montana, from 1976 – 1990. His most recent exhibition was in August, 2013 at the Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, where he showed his own work alongside his son Hunter Buck (an emerging talent also represented by the Zolla/Lieberman Gallery). Buck is husband to the sculptor Deborah Butterfield (best known for her bronze cast horses), and father to Hunter and Wilder Buck, both of whom are also practicing artists. John Buck and Butterfield moved to Bozeman, Montana, in 1978 where to this day they divide their time between their ranch and studios in Hawaii.
It was this relative isolation that Buck found on his Montana ranch that Bruce Guenther suggests as the impetus for a shift in his work to combine sculpture with painting in large scale formats. Buck’s earliest influences came from his artist-teachers Robert Arneson, Roy DeForest and William T. Wiley and their use of a simple drawing style combined with a fascination of Wild West caricatures to convey humor. Consequently, his earliest works comment on male gender roles through the highly stylized lens of the Old West cowboy through freestanding painted wood sculptures carved in shallow, flat relief. However, whilst these works convey humor and perhaps even at times anxiety, they lack emotion – they are static and lack the strength to provoke thought for the viewer.
In later works such as “Return” (84.141), of 1983, owned by SAM, one can see Buck’s shift from playful, perhaps kitsch, imagery of caricatured males toward a more subtle representation of humanity that is neither male nor female. “Using a combination of unstretched canvas and freestanding figures or objects placed several feet in front of it, he has expanded the figure-ground relationship into sculptural installations with a mysterious quality about them. The canvas provides a “back drop” onto which he draws and paints flat symbols in a relationship to the objects placed in front, telling a story rather like dioramas as in a museum of natural history”.
In paperwork completed for SAM by John Buck on February 25, 1986, he highlights influences for the imagery of “Return”, as “The Labyrinth and Lake Tahoe” and the significance of this work in the greater oeuvre of his work to that date as “To express the (complex nature) of the creative process, as in the journey through the labyrinth.” The meaning of the title in his words is “To come Home.”
As in “Return”, Buck’s work from the early 1980s typically consisted of found objects alongside a freestanding, painted wood sculpture (a human figure), placed in front of a canvas which Buck painted in a manner that visually blended both sculpture and its flat backdrop. Buck positioned “the wood figure … mere inches from the surface of the canvas and has been painted so as to appear a seamless part of the canvas behind it – in effect being painted out of existence while still very tangibly occupying space and casting shadows. This placement also makes it harder to see how the figures were constructed. The result is to focus the viewer’s attention more fully on the overall impact of the tableaux and not on the construction of individual parts.” Bruce Guenther highlights Buck’s increasing concern for the natural environment as the impetus for this shift in topic for his art making. Works from this point in his career, such as “Return”, become multilayered, quite literally, filled with symbols and complex iconography, pointing toward social issues. However Buck is hesitant to divulge what he sees as the significance invested in his art, and is instead more comfortable with viewers to find their own meaning within each piece. Of his work, Buck does say, “The imagery in my work is personal and social, political, religious, popular. In essence, I build the surface out of images of a personal nature – my experiences – and work toward an idea that reaches for something outside my own personal dimension.”
Robin Updike in a Seattle Times article in 1995 wrote “Buck’s signature motif is a headless, genderless wooden figure placed on a stand, with curls, spirals and geometric shapes of carved “rocks” looming where its head should be. The shapes suggest a physical representation of the abstract process of thinking.” “Return”, owned by SAM, most certainly fits into the visual model that Buck has become well known for as an artist.
Whilst perhaps best known as a sculptor, John Buck also remains well respected as a print maker – an uncommon feat to be skilled across both mediums. His style of woodblock printing was impressive in both their large scale and bold, sophisticated imagery. Drawing from his experience as a sculptor and comfort in working with wood, Buck created his woodblocks differently to other artists in his use of the printed surface to create negative space, leaving a chalk on chalkboard effect. Prior to 1985 Buck’s prints relied heavily on a graphic use of color, often combining black, white, and red. From 1985 however, carrying onto the early 1990s, Buck extended his color palette but became more subtle in his color combinations. “Father and Son” (89.185) of 1985, held in SAM’s collection, is an example of John Buck’s strength as a printmaker, and a shift in his use of color for the medium toward a more tonal, sophisticated, and, if you like, physiological, palette.
“In “Father and Son”, Buck addresses the fear, hopes, desires, and dreams he has about his newborn son. The dark blue ground contains two moonlit landscapes, the skyline of a city paralleling the composition’s top edge, and a mountain rising from the bottom edge. Between the cityscape and the mountain are symbols and silhouettes – a horse, two figures embracing, two generic figures holding hands, and strange humanoid creatures that seem to combine ancient symbols and the imaginings of science fiction. The dark blue ground conveys a dreamlike atmosphere, a quality underscored by the various symbols. It is as if these symbols and images came to the artist while he was working in his studio at night, at the moment when he became aware of being deeply connected to his son as well as isolated from him. Perhaps because of the subject matter, this print conveys a sense of isolation … Humans, the print seems to say, are simultaneously joined and separated. A parent can help a child grow up but cannot ensure what will happen in the future.”

Throughout his career Buck has shown his work around the United States in galleries such as (but not limited to) the Mandeville Art Gallery, University of California; Santa Cruz County Museum of Art, California; Contemporary Arts Center, Honolulu; San Antonio Art Institute, Texas; Kemper Gallery at the Kansas city Art Institute, Kansas; Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco; Arvada Center for the Arts, Arvada, Colorado; Palm Springs Desert Museum, California; Contemporary Art Museum, Honolulu; Gallery of Contemporary Art, Lewis & Clark College, Portland; Holter Museum of Art, Helena, Montana; The Plains Museum, Fargo, North Dakota; The Western Gallery, Western Washington University, Washington; Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, Spokane, Washington; Bellevue Arts Museum, Washington; Yellowstone Art Museum, Billings, Montana; San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco; Institute of Contemporary Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, Virginia; The Noyes Museum, Oceanville, New Jersey; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Maryland Institute, Baltimore, Maryland; Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois; and the Washington State University, Pullman, Washington.
Buck has most recently been honored by the Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, Missouri, in 2008 as an “Outstanding Nationally recognized Alumni in Sculpture”, by the Montana Arts Council, Helena, Montana in 2010 with the “Governor’s Arts Award” and from the Yellowstone Art Museum, Billings, Montana, as “Artist of the Year” in 2011.
In more recent years of art making, Buck has shifted away from his best-known combinations of sculpture and canvas backgrounds toward creating single objects mounted on the wall. In this development Buck remains a sculptor with a devotion to wood, but his single pieces are now more self-sufficient, forming their own puzzle instead of acting as lone piece, as was the case with his multi-object installations. They are beautiful and both finer in technique and detail than his earlier work, dissolving the boundaries between painting and sculpture, surface and object, in an unexpected manner. As Marcia Tucker, founding and former director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, said, “Looking at John Buck’s work is like dreaming it.”

-Katharine Morris, Curatorial Intern, 2015


Bibliography:
Deitch, Sande. “Butterfield/Buck: A Collaboration.” Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, 1986.
Guenther, Bruce. “John Buck: Documents Northwest: The PONCHO Series.” Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 1984.
Guenther, Bruce. “John Buck.” San Francisco: Anne Kohs & Associates, Inc. for John Buck, 1988.
Linda Tesner, “John Buck: Recent Sculpture and Woodblock Prints.” Portland, Oregon: Gallery of Contemporary Art Lewis & Clark College, 1999.
Robin Updike. Seattle Times, 1/17/95, P. F 1.
Yau, John et. al. “John Buck: Woodblock Prints.” San Francisco, California: San Francisco, 1993.
Yau, John. “John Buck.” New York: DC Moore Gallery, 1999.