"Practicing Photosynthesis" Drawing

Charles Buckley was born and raised near the beach in sunny Southern California. He went to California College of Art in Oakland and moved to Brooklyn to attend Hunter College where he got his MFA. His work in private collections across the United States and Europe and he exhibits with the Susan Eley Gallery in New York.

Buckley's current body of work, The Striated Drawings, explores memory, forgetting, and the nature of nostalgia. Made with ink, the drawings are composed entirely of horizontal lines and the negative, undrawn space between them. He had the idea after finding some photographs his father had taken of the moon landing on live television in 1969. The CRT lines of the old tv were prominent and the images evoked a nostalgia within him that he has been investigating ever since.

The works draw from both found and personal photographs, lending them an initial sense of familiarity. But that familiarity is unstable. Up close, representation dissolves into abstraction; the particulars grow hazy and give way to the rhythm of the lines themselves. Much of the pictorial information has been stripped away, yet a sense of narrative integrity remains and the viewer is left to fill in what is missing.
This is precisely the point. Buckley understands forgetting not as a failure of memory, but as its essential condition. Nostalgia, he argues, is produced through what we selectively retain and what we lose. In The Striated Drawings, the line constructs the image while the space between (the absence, the omission) generates its emotional charge. Like nostalgia itself, the closer one looks, the less certain things become.