Bucky Painting

California native Chris Bird currently calls Kansas City home, where the downtown art scene is vibrant, eclectic, and inspirational. “I couldn’t have chosen a better city to be an artist than Kansas City,” he says, “living so close to the Kansas City Art Institute I’m always energized by the creativity going on around me. The Nelson Atkins Museum and Kemper Museum of Modern Art are a few blocks walk away. Crossroads Arts District downtown is phenomenal. I absolutely love it here.” Chris’s figurative art is influenced by some 20th Century giants: Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Theophilus Brown, also contemporary artist Malcom T. Liepke. “My work now is an attempt to evoke an emotional response from the viewer rather than representing absolute realism,” he states, “which is sometimes an enormous failure, but I simply move on and start again.” “Pablo Picasso said, ‘It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.’ He summed up what I am attempting to achieve in my own work eloquently as I continue to drag out my own inner child.”