Inspired Collaboration: An Interview with Artist James Buckhouse

 

 

One of our creative through-lines at Lan Jaenicke is collaboration. We’ve had the privilege of partnering with ceramicists and textile designers, ballet dancers and vocalists, to create interdisciplinary expressions of beauty.

Most recently, we had the opportunity to work with my friend, artist and designer James Buckhouse, to adapt one of his lyrical abstract paintings into a printed fabric. James and I have been friends ever since I collaborated with him at his celebrated SFBallet Sensorium event.

James is an artist and designer practicing at the intersection of the visual and performing arts, and has exhibited his art at the Whitney Biennial, the Solomon R. Guggenheim’s Works & Process Series, The Institute of Contemporary Art in London, and many other institutions. He has also collaborated with leading choreographers at companies including the New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, and LA Dance Project.

This spring, we debuted two pieces featuring James’ painting as highlights of Series No. 23: the Custom Shuimo Painting Dress in Satin Organza and the Hand Pleated Wrap Skirt in Silk Organza.

James kindly spoke to the Journal this week and took us inside his process, projects, and travels.

 

 

 

Would you share your creative process when painting? Does it differ from working in other media?

I’m looking for ways to invite the audience to complete the work in their own minds, where the work opens a door and the viewer can walk through. Sometimes this means painting something that hints at a story that will be completed just around the corner—like depicting a path up a hill or an open door (or something that looks like a door). Other times it means creating something evocative—like an abstract, non-figurative mark-making gesture that almost seems to move as a type of visual music in the mind of the viewer.

To get there, I’m either drawing and painting scenes you could recognize (like landscapes that feel like film stills) or creating abstract moments that hopefully send you down a path of imagining movement. I start with drawings or photographs, and then try to imagine what needs to change to create an invitation for that secret second story that only exists in the mind of the viewer.

Would you share a bit about the work that became the gorgeous garments?

The paintings that became dresses with Lan are abstractions. I hope they evoke movement, music, and a type of emotional curiosity for what will happen next. On the dress, they move as the body moves. So this collaboration with the viewer becomes quite literal. The work is completed by the viewer as she wears it—embodies it—and takes it on an adventure on her own terms (and in her own mind). The paintings came out of a body of work I did to create animations for the SFBallet and LA Dance Project.

"The paintings that became dresses with Lan are abstractions. I hope they evoke movement, music, and a type of emotional curiosity for what will happen next."

 

Would you share a bit about the collaborative process of working with Lan?

Lan and I met through the ballet. A few years ago I created a night of total art and design at the SFBallet, where I hoped to bring together audiences from both the visual and performing arts. The event was called Sensorium and happened one day a year for about five years. Every time we did it the event sold out, all the way to the rafters It was wonderful: the night featured exciting, challenging, contemporary ballet, visual art installations, and something we called instant couture.

 

 

Instant Couture was daring—instead of checking your coat, you’d check all your clothes, received a temporary cover-up, and then right there in our own little mini-stage built in the lobby, you’d receive a couture gown, draped and cut for you in front of everyone, completed right in the moment that you could wear for the evening and home that night.

 

How did it feel to see the finished dress walk down the runway?

For Lan’s latest collection, we transferred two of my paintings to different stiffnesses of satin and silk. But—and here’s the big secret—I didn’t see the final designs until the night of the show. The actual fashion designs are all Lan, my contribution was the fabric. She created her designs based on what she saw in the paintings-as-fabric.

For the runway show, I was in the front row and was very excited to see what Lan had done with my paintings. I trust her artistically and personally, so I knew it would be good, but I wasn’t prepared for how wonderful it would feel to see the strokes transform through the movement of the body, re-animated on the human figure and flowing through space as a volume, not as just the illusion of space. The dress as embodied by the model made all the difference.

 

"I wasn’t prepared for how wonderful it would feel to see the strokes transform through the movement of the body, re-animated on the human figure and flowing through space as a volume..." 

A few years prior I had collaborated with Bryce Dessner (The National) and Benjamin Millipied (LA Dance Project) to create  video projections and costumes for a new ballet. The result was 180 paintings that combined into a series of videos that were projected to create an environment for the dance. I took one of the paintings and transferred it to satin and then cut it into costumes for the dancers. I had designed costumes for the ballet before, but had never done this type of pattern transfer to satin. I called Lan and asked her how to do it and she introduced me to the process I used for the ballet. That show traveled to Paris, LA, and a few other spots, including a night at the SF Symphony’s Soundbox. 

 

 Images of James' work featured in a ballet by Benjamin Millipied and Bryce Dessner.

Lan’s designs for her collection use paintings from the same series as the ballet with Dessner and Millipied, but her designs for the actual garments are very different. She utilizes drape and the body’s own architecture to bring the paintings-as-fabric to life as echoes of the body’s form. There was one moment in the runway show when the model turned and the dress caught a volume of air and as it turned the enlarged brush strokes became thick, full, living sculptures. I loved it.

 

You're currently traveling in Spain – what’s inspiring you?

I’m writing this while traveling through Spain and then stopping in Big Sur before returning home. My family traveled to Spain for the art and food—we were there for Velázquez, Dali, Picasso, and Gaudi. We took a pilgrimage to see Guernica. We traveled to Dali’s home and studio. But what I want to talk about is Toledo.

We visited Toledo as a part of my ongoing research into what I call “Outsider Insight.” I’m researching the history of innovation and tracking down this idea that the greatest moments of inventiveness and human innovation come from unexpected combinations of seemingly unrelated ideas, cultures or fields.

Toledo is a marvelous example of exactly this. Known as the City of Three Cultures, it was at its peak when Islamic, Christian, and Jewish scholars all gathered together to collaborate on translations (and re-combinations) of ancient texts, contemporary science, and forward thinking ideas. History focuses on the conquests; I am more interested in the in-between-times when peaceful collaboration pushed human knowledge forward. Great advancements happen when we collaborate.