KEN BUHLER
CECILY PARKS
Birdlands (American Dipper), 2014. Lithography, etching, and letterpress. 23.5 x 30 in. Edition of 20.
Birdlands (Field Fare), 2014. Lithography, etching, and letterpress. 23.5 x 30 in. Edition of 20.
Birdlands (Slaty Flowerpiercer), 2014. Lithography, etching, and letterpress. 23.5 x 30 in. Edition of 20
Birdlands (Yucatan Nightjar), 2014. Lithography, etching, and letterpress. 23.5 x 30 in. Edition of 20.
Birdlands (Twelve-Wired Bird of Paradise), 2014. Lithography, etching, and letterpress. 23.5 x 30 in. Edition of 20.
Birdlands (Twelve-wired Bird of Paradise), 2014. Lithography and etching. 23.5 x 19 in. Edition I/IV.
Birdlands (Field Fare), 2014. Lithography and etching. 23.75 x 19 in. Edition I/II.
Birdlands (Slaty Flowerpiercer), 2014. Lithography and etching. 23.75 x 19 in. Edition PP.
Birdlands (Yucatan Nightjar), 2014. Lithography, etching and letterpress. 23.75 x 19 in. Edition PP
In “Birdlands” (2014) Buhler teams up with poet Cecily Parks. In these six prints, the pairing of the text and image create an almost synesthetic visual to verbal relationship. Here, the artist makes use of soft ground, which has the property of accepting stamped impressions, that are then etched as image. The stamped images become etched deep in the copper, and then can be printed in various colors. This creates a dialogue in the page between the mechanical and the hand-drawn image.
In the third print, “Slaty Flower Piercer””, one feels the merging of image and text. The poet’s line: “The ocean pushed against the shore” is visualized in Buhler’s paired etching as blue wave forms cascade over an ochre ground. In “Twelve-Wired Bird of paradise, Parks writes: “We are still in paradise but we don’t know it.” Ken Buhler’s arabesques and layers of curving line in this print seem to agree.
B. 1955 IOWA
Ken Buhler draws from nature for his motifs, exploring coral, plant forms, and patterns of growth.Art critic Roberta Smith has written in the New York Times that Buhler’s paintings “are beautifully made and distinguished by an ambition to reduce nature to a state of luminous abstraction.” His paintings, drawings, and prints blend abstraction and recognizable imagery–often drawn from botanical or decorative forms–to explore the “terra incognita” of the natural world. Working with washes of bold color, meandering lines, stencils, and rubber stamps, Buhler creates images that feel at once new and familiar, revealing a world both luminous and layered.
Buhler has exhibited widely in New York City and throughout the United States and Europe since the late 1980’s. In recent years he has worked on print projects with Jungle Press ofBrooklyn, VanDeb Editions of NYC, and Oehme Graphics of Steamboat Springs, Colorado.His solo exhibitions include shows at Lesley Heller Gallery, O'Hara Gallery, Michael WallsGallery, and the Beach Museum of Art, Kansas. His work has been reviewed in many publications including The New York Times, Arts, Artnews, and Art in America. Buhler’s work can be seen in many public and private collections, including the Wichita Museum ofFine Art, the de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University, the Maslow Collection, IBM, and the Ulrich Museum of Fine Arts, Wichita, Kansas. Buhler has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships from noted institutions including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1987, 2009),the New York Foundation for the Arts (1994, 2009), and a fellowship from the NationalEndowment for the Arts in painting in 1987. He has been a fellow at MacDowell, Jentel, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and Ballinglen Arts Foundation (Ireland). Buhler is aProfessor Emeritus in the Studio Arts program at Bard College, where he taught for 22 years.
Cecily Parks is the author of the poetry collections O’Nights (Alice James Books, 2015) and Field Folly Snow (University of Georgia Press, 2008). She teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at Texas State University and lives in Austin.