NO FUTURE presents “Flowers in the Dustbin : Timothy B. Buckwalter“

Magazine illustrations, cartoons and comic strips from the recent past are appropriated for Timothy Buckwalter’s paintings. Once removed from their original context, Buckwalter edits the images into new narratives and repaints them by hand on to kinetic fields of color. To further enhance the re-contextualizing of the image, titles for the finished paintings are chosen from modern literature. Tacks are applied to the edges of the canvas as a reference to the history of painting.

Buckwalter’s paintings — by blending together forgotten images and comic dialogues with fields of color to create contemporary tales of anxiety, desire, idiocy, anger, joy and fear — connect the dots to our past, those unreconciled moments that continue to hemorrhage into our present.

For the drawings, he slashes down or abbreviates text (usually lifted from comic strips and cartoon anthologies) into new phrases and inks them onto crisp white sheets of paper.

Often the finished statements are reflections of Buckwalter’s psyche at the time.

Originally from Pennsylvania, Timothy Buckwalter (born 1966) now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. He graduated with honors from Philadelphia’s Tyler School of Art in 1988.

Though he holds a bachelors degree in sculpture (having studied under Annie Sprinkle, Dennis Adams, and Steven Beyer), Buckwalter is known primarily as a painter.

His work has been included in the Linz Biennale and exhibited nationally at De/Chiara Stewart Gallery in New York; Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Oregon; Rebecca Ibel Gallery in Columbus, Ohio; Pharmaka in Los Angeles; Lizabeth Olivera, Pro Arts, Oakland Art Gallery in Oakland; and Four Walls, Southern Exposure, The Luggage Store and Braunstein/Quay in San Francisco.

Buckwalter has also written extensively about fine art. In addition to his popular blog (where you are currently parked), he has penned features and reviews for San Francisco Chronicle, The East Bay Monthly and KQED.

Over the last five years, Buckwalter helped pioneer the curating of online exhibitions, including his own yearlong weekly drawing shows. Recently, he guest curated a show — based on Echo & The Bunnymen’s pop classic Killing Moon — for The Beholder. He has also guest curated Come Tomorrow: 25 Years of NIAD for Eyebeam’s Add-Art project and Feeling Yourself Disintegrate for SFMOMA’s OpenSpace.

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