Soul Breaker – Christopher Bucklow
Ball-Press have published the work of Christopher Bucklow for more than a decade. The publication of Soul Breaker this year is another landmark in the development of a series of works that are generous in their teaching, private in their myth and sensitive in their tendrils to the history of art. This latest body of work is a vast project of myth and understanding — an atlas for those who wish to explore.
Bucklow’s earliest endeavours grafted the natural world of plants into hybrids that were symbolic of the symbiosis of the instinctual and the learnt within the psyche. Bucklow embraced this dualism, leading finally to a breakthrough in the works of pinhole photography that were to make him justly famous.
The ‘Guest’ series was created in Venice. They were an attempt to depict a spirit-unification along the lines that Blake intended in his balancing of the Zoas… the unconscious and the conscious, the female and the male, the right and the left hemisphere… currently languishing in separateness at the hands of materialist scientific rationalism. In Blake, Bucklow found a similar synthesis … or at least the path towards the notion of such a thing; the mythic assault upon a Grand-Unified-Theory… HARMONY amongst the Zoas.
To tell the story of one’s life… this is a great undertaking that can be made at any age and by any person. Alas, the task is rarely easy. To confront that problem, firstly, the subject must construct an arena; a temenos. Christopher Bucklow has done just this, over a career lasting decades, with cycles of doing, interrogation, explanation and exhibition.
Ball-Press, our small independent publishing operation continues our close connection with Bucklow, publishing catalogues, and the extraordinary notations of hundreds of dreams in his book ‘Nantucket Sleigh Ride’ (2017). Each achievement adds to the greater project which is the explication of method, and the alembic creation of unity in the psyche. In a polarised age, Christopher Bucklow looks instead for an energetic but stable unity. How much more Blakean could that project be?
The paintings that Bucklow turned to in the early years of the century wrestled with the development of the suggested entities from his earlier works. Gradually, like emerging characters in a darkroom, these players gained form, definition, life. The recent series of vast panoramic paintings illustrated in the Soul Breaker publication occupy a fully-realised world. These heroes are actors on a mythic stage, narrators of Bucklow’s mythos. By the experience of looking, their generosity and completeness invite the viewer to experience that mythos and to partake. Bucklow as artist, philosopher and educator offers the viewer the chance to realise their own myth to live by.
Alex Faulkner
The texts below began as an email letter to Blake Society Chair, Sibylle Erle, from Bucklow, after he had sent her the new book:
“It occurred to me that although the book refers to the mythos that has arisen in my work, there is no clear description of the story it tells. I suppose that might be because it feels a bit ‘bald’ to state it openly in words. So I thought I could describe it more allusively by using roughly similar characters from Blake. Here are the pictures from the book, with a Blakean reading below each one”:
The Darkling Plain, 2021
In this painting we see two parts of Albion, as divided parts of the primordial whole: Los is depicted as a boy sitting on Tharmas his appetitive self, who is represented as a reptile, a large tortoise. They are surrounded by the apparatus of bee-keeping. Los is just recovering from three years of fallen Urizenic labour during which he used his verbal linguistic self to excess, while writing a book on the Jungian mythos of the painter Francis Bacon. The landscape is barren, a ‘darkling plain’, reflecting the death of his imagistic powers, faith is at its furthest retreat, but the tide is beginning to turn, and imagistic language is coming back to life.
The beehive and the bees within, represent the containing Golgonoozic skull and the busy energy within, where each co-operative bee has the well-being of the whole hive as its goal. For neuroanatomists, the ape sitting on the reptile will represent an almost perfect diagram of the structure of the human brain.
Hold Me Like a Child, 2025
This painting shows the unified Zoas, in a state of fear as one of them wishes to break apart again. The fear is of disintegration. There is rage and fear in the face of Tharmas the appetitive Zoa, here represented in Kabuki form. The figures are represented in an opening slit into a stage cloth. The whole of the landscape left and right of the figures is actually a painted stage-cloth. The darkness behind the cloth is from where the zoa figures are emerging. The dark Zoa visible in the backstage darkness within the slit, seems to be imploring the female Zoa to stay backstage. She wishes to emerge, but still holds on tight for security, to the dark male. Everything is uncertain. It is Autumn, the chestnut leaves are crisp and brown, and yet the waterfall still flows
The Promise, 2024
A female emanation, who is coloured the blue of the open sky, has conjured up a memory-vision of a profoundly moving incident from the life of the young Urizen. She is using this to encourage him into the full embrace of the united Zoas.
An alternative reading could be that the united Zoas are looking back at their earlier divided states, attempting to identify the first experience that would lead to their unification.
Talking In My Sleep, 2026
This is an image of thanksgiving for the presence of the Jerusalem figure in Los’s life. She is personified as Mary-Athena/Sofia. We see her with the circular dream diagram she authored, a record of the 1,500 dream messages she has sent Los, guiding him towards unification with Urizen, Tharmas and Luvah. (These are published in Nantucket Sleigh Ride, Ball Press 2017.)
