Luke Miller Buchanan Opens “I Would Love You Over”

This city has many young painters who are the product of the school of design at NC State.  Enloe is also a wellspring- the magnet high school with a focus on creative work played a role for many local artists and musicians.  Luke Miller Buchanan is a product of both of those and his intimate connection with Raleigh has been a constant theme of his work.  We talked with Buchanan about his new show and the big influencers on his thinking.

The painter studied under Lope Max Diaz when the College of Design was the School of Design and offered traditional painting classes.  Since then art has been marginalized in the program, but for Buchanan the time with the college of design was serindipitous- allowing him to explore both architecture and traditional art work.  Buchanan's show opens today, September 1st at Rebus Works with a reception from 7-9:30pm. 

I Would Love You Over by Luke Miller Buchanan will hang through September 24th.

David: This is your first show in Raleigh in a while?
Luke: Its the first solo show in Raleigh in over a year.  I have had a few group shows including Anthony Ulinksi’s show that is at Rebus now, because he was my woodworking mentor but also I consider him one of my painting teachers as well because he really taught me. I feel like Lope Max [Diaz] really taught me how to think about painting, how to conceive up a painting and execute it. And then Anthony showed me how to do that every day and also get through your daily life. How to present work in a way that it – I learned how to be professional from him. Through making furniture and also through his painting, seeing how he dealt with commissions and clients and things like that. It was really kind of where I learned how to kind of function as an artist, like the business of being an artist.

David: So you worked under him?
Luke: Yeah, for about five years, doing mostly carpentry. But as he was transitioning into doing painting. So I was really happy to be in that show at Rebus because it was mostly his work, but it was also a lot of people that were assistants of his including myself, which was cool. So yeah, other than that, individual pieces in shows, I haven’t done large-scale shows.

David: You studied architecture?
Luke: Yeah, at NC State, which is when I met Lope Max Diaz, my painting teacher. I went into architecture because I really enjoyed drafting and drawing and using my hands and also the conceptualization of spaces, I was really interested in how people used space – still am – and how people, in some ways, design their own spaces within the confines of what’s been provided for them but also how different people experience the same space in their own way, which when I started, they switched over to digital drafting while I was in school and I didn’t get to use my hands and do the digital drawing as much as I wanted to. So I took a class with Lope Max just to kind of have painting as a means to physically create something and I just really loved the class. And I started painting pictures of buildings and investigating those spaces I was doing through the curriculum as so much as like site research, things like that, but in a different kind of way still investigating the same spaces in histories of places but with an eye more on the individual and not public at large, I guess. And in the same way, the public at large, but as individuals.

David: You’ve been painting for ten years?
Luke: Yeah, probably about ten years. The first painting I ever did was for that class and it was of the Dylan Supply Company. Let me see if it’s up there, by the window, over the studies.

David: I know that piece.
Luke: Yeah, and so that was the first painting I ever did because I took that class and said “alright, what do I paint Lope Max?” He said “paint whatever you want.” And for some reason, I was working for Anthony, and I drove back and forth to work in front of that building every day and for some reason I just really liked, not so much just the buildings, even though I really like how boxed off and clean cut they are against the horizon, but I also loved that intermediate space they create that’s not really a parking lot because it’s not functioning, it’s just an empty space. Which is why I think things like parking lots show up a lot in my paintings, because they kind of represent a cube of empty space which at the same time, the boxes are cubes of enveloped space and the difference between the two… I think what was really striking to me, just driving by it every day, and for some reason that’s the first thing that popped into my head, that that’s what I want to paint, I tried to do some figurative painting, like I did a similar style like a painting of my truck. It came out totally different, because it was the perspective instead of going in, it was definitely bowing out. A few other investigations with photography and time signatures, having different photographs taken at different times.

Through that, I really found the experience of going to a place, taking the pictures and then bringing them back into the studio and processing, both the experience of having gone to take the pictures and the physical documentation of that has started to manipulate that space, kind of what I really have started to enjoy the most. And feel like I have the greatest power to manipulate and create something kind of different. But yeah, Raleigh’s been my subject matter because I’ve been here 23 years and I’ll go travel to other places in the country and bring my camera and take pictures, and end up doing paintings or even just take day trips to Goldsboro or Hillsborough or Asheville or places like that, usually trying to seek out the more neglected industrial areas that have kind of fallen into disrepair because I feel like those spaces, it’s almost like Boxer in Animal Farm. They worked so hard and they gave everything that they had, and now they’ve been tossed aside and nobody really cares about them anymore.

I try to remind people that these spaces exist and they were once very important to a lot of people, and considered to be important for different reasons which I think is kind of poignant to our time right now, the idea of sustainability and the fact that resources are running out whether anybody wants to admit it. To start using what we have to its fullest potential. And I think that’s also… people ask why I don’t do architecture anymore, or study architecture really, or how I never really got licensed or started a practice. But what they don’t really understand is the design education changes the way you think about the world. And once you start thinking like that, you think about everything like that. So there’s no way you could really give up on it. It’s just a matter of focusing that same process on other issues like it could be making a painting or it could be repairing a piece of furniture or it could be drawing one of those trivia fliers. It’s just a matter of with what I’ve got, how do I make what I need out of this? So that’s what I’ve been trying to do with this new series, is use things I’ve had in my studio for a long time, things that I’ve had around the house for a long time, things that I’ve kept with the purpose of using someday.

It’s gotten to a point where two years ago, the show I did at Design Box, where I used a lot of old letters and papers was kind of the beginning of that because I started to say okay, I’ve been keeping these things for a while now to do something with them. Like it’s time to do something with them. Then that moved into the paintings I did for my last show, that centered a lot around records and physical record sleeves of albums that had been important to me, matched with places in Raleigh that were for myself significant. So now I’ve taken that even further, and in a way, in the opposite direction where the things I’ve been keeping are materials more so than mementos or even just like "donage" of old homework papers and things that meant something once and it’s hard to just throw it away. Again, which comes back to the idea of like, there’s got to be a fine line of a TV show like Hoarders and then recycling. It’s probably not a fine line, I think it’d be a pretty broad line, but keeping things and findings ways to use them is important up to a point, where I don’t want to keep carrying around these things forever. So I started picking up pieces of wood that I’d kept and combining them together and creating different formats to paint on, and then matching those to the subject matter that I was painting. So a way to kind of make the materials more significant to the actual painting, more so than just being a medium for the paint.

David: Are there any pieces about Raleigh?
Luke: The first few that I did were of Philadelphia from a trip I took up there last spring, and the ones I’m working on now are Raleigh. The one behind you is the Boylan bridge, which it actually came out of a conversation I was having with Derek, the new GM for Ashley’s places, you know? He lives nearby and he saw my paintings and said he lives near there and it would be interesting to have a painting of something around that area. Because he was excited about living down there, and I was like yeah, that’s a cool idea. So we kind of tossed some ideas back and forth about the area, and I realized I kind of neglected part of that historic… you can’t drive over that bridge without seeing somebody posing for a picture or taking pictures of the sunset or sunrise or anything, which is great, because it’s a really great vantage point. It’s not the original bridge, there used to be a really awesome span there, but just the idea of what’s going on underneath it.

David: How long ago was the original bridge replaced?
Luke:  I remember they tore it down because they said it wasn’t strong enough to handle – I’m pretty sure, this may be totally off – but I think their logic for tearing it down was they wanted to strengthen it for larger cars and trucks that were starting to come through. I think Martin Street used to connect, there used to be an entrance ramp up onto Boylan where it kind of ends now where Flanders’ Gallery is, and there’s a parking lot? It used to continue up, and the bridge was a double stand-like metal bridge. It was really awesome looking if you find one of the old photographs of it. The idea that that existed there and now this is there, and it’s still the same space is kind of the jumping off point for all the ideas I’m kind of looking into in my paintings. I’m going to be doing another one of just kind of right down the street from there, because when I was walking over to take the pictures of this bridge, I walked by this other place that I was like I’ve never looked at it from this angle and took some pictures of that. So I’m probably going to work that out too. But yeah, it should be quite a number of paintings.

David: Yeah, it doesn’t sound like you’re tired of Raleigh.
Luke: No way. I’ve been here a long time and I’ve seen people move away and move back. I’ve travelled a lot and seen a lot of different places in the world. At first it was because my family was here and my niece and nephew were little and I wanted to be around when they grew up. They’re still little, but my niece just turned 12 and they’re to the point where I have enough of a relationship with them that I could go somewhere and I wouldn’t really lose that, but there’s not anywhere that I want to live more than here. At the same time, I do like to travel, and if I found that place I might go live there. But until now, I really like being here and I like walking around and thinking about history, and again, not just the history of the city but my history in the city, places that remind you of different times. Very different times that might have been spent in the same place, when you’re in the same town for a long time, you know?

David: That reminds me of the Wilmont Illustration that was getting a lot of attention when they changed ownership.
Luke: Oh yeah, I did that actually for an architecture class. We had to do drawings and diagrams of any building we could think of, and I think most of the students did Frank Wright Houses and Notre Dame or something like that, but I was living at the Wilmont. That was before I started painting. I was already kind of fascinated by that building, that it had been an apartment for 80 years. I was living there, and other people lived there, so I did all those drawings for the project then Rob Allen put them up on the fake –well, not fake I guess – but the Wilmont MySpace page and then some company took them and tried to use them for advertising. But they took them down when I asked them to.

David: What did your professor think of your style? You had that perspective going on there.
Luke: She had just started that semester. I can’t remember her name, but she really liked it and I got lucky. I wasn’t actually in the school of design at that point. I was just taking classes and applying, because I decided I wanted to go to that school of design. So I definitely was not in the same program as the other students, so after class I wasn’t talking to them about what they were doing. I was just kind of in my own world, you know? But luckily she really liked it, and she liked the cutaway I did as if the building was made but the wall was stripped away.

That and the teacher I had previous, who kept the sketchbook for history of design 1, he really liked my sketchbook drawings as well which at that time were pretty much just doodles, but I remember him saying it was a good way to remember things, just drawing these pictures. We got graded on our sketchbook in that class which was pretty awesome, because I never got a positive grade for drawing in the margins of my notebook before. But I realized I could do drawings that didn’t look traditional, and I remember my friend Max Gaskins dad, who was an architect from school of design, Karl Gaskins, he said when I was trying to do hand lettering which we had to do and I had the messiest handwriting, he said "it doesn’t necessarily have to look really neat, it just has to all look the same. Consistent." And I thought, oh, maybe the same thing goes with my drawing style. It doesn’t have to be perfect, because I can’t draw straight lines, but it doesn’t matter because there’s not a lot of straight lines in the world.

David: Right. Do you think of it as design?
Luke: Painting?

David: Yeah.
Luke: Not consciously, like all the time, but in retrospect, as I said, I think the design thinking permeates everything that I do from restaurant work (ed note: Buchanan tends bar at Poole’s) to painting to teaching to anything like that.

David: Yeah, it’s interesting you say that, because just talking to Ashley Christensen lately I’ve realized how much of a designer she is and a design thinker. You can see a lot of that in her execution, so that’s interesting as an employee that you would say you think about it there. Do you guys ever have conscious discussions about design?
Luke: Definitely in the first year when a million decisions had to be made. She’s got a really good idea, like she did all the interior and stuff, but then there’s other things like how do you get ticketed and how do you get this out and things like that, that we definitely had conversations about.

 

David: A lot of that hasn’t changed since you opened either, you guys have really stuck to the way that works over there.
Luke: There actually has been a lot of changes, but there’s certain core things that were settled on early that just sort of stayed that way. Then there’s some things like that that we later found could be improved, and they were improved, but if it’s not broke don’t fix it, right? But yeah, working for her has definitely helped me to realize that I think about that kind of thing outside of a “design problem.”

I remember when I was in school, we had an assignment, it was actually to design the civic center that’s built now, but it was only the first semester we were going to do it. It was a huge project, and I remember one of the students complaining there weren’t enough constraints on the project. The teacher said you better enjoy this while it lasts, because once you get out of school there’s going to be nothing but constraints. You’re not going to have an opportunity to work as freely and openly as this for the next 25 years.

I remember hearing that and thinking, maybe this isn’t what I want to spend my time on, because I want to make those decisions. But working with Ashley, she always – and the same with Anthony, the two of them have been the best bosses I’ve ever had, because they let me give feedback or present ideas and if they’re good ideas you go with them, and if it’s not a good idea you don’t go with it. I don’t know why everybody’s not like that. A lot of times people try to push ideas that aren’t good well past the point you realize it’s not working, and I think that’s where most of the major problems in the world come from.

David: How big is the show going to be?
Luke: I expect to have 7-8 pieces and there’s going to be a couple of assemblage pieces, which is something I actually did briefly before, I did one painting that was in a show at Bickett Gallery. It was probably, I don’t know what the date was, 2005 or so?

It was a problem I drew up in my sketchbook one day and it was the kind of thing where I have to do this. It was a combination of a painting with shelving built-in, and the shelving was kind of a knick-knack shelf where I chose individual pieces. It was a derivation of what I was doing at the time, including pieces of metal I found at the scene of the crime, you know, into my paintings. For me this was a physical representation of that space. It’s physically in the painting. But it started to get to a point where I thought it might be a little hokey or a little gimmicky, people looking and finding nails and things, and a lot of times, depending on who… off the record, depending on who says they like something, sometimes I’m like oh good, I’m doing the right thing, and sometimes I’m like, back up. So including those little knick-knacks was a way of saying these images, they represent memories, but also I keep these things around the studio.

These little things also represent memories and experiences and things like that. So I did that painting and I really liked it and I was at the art museum, I used the wood shop, I had this elaborate painting. It was the one painting, and the rest of the paintings at the show were all just the normal kind of rectangular format and had nothing to do with that painting. I realized then when I did it, it was ahead of its time in my thought process. I had that idea, and I think it was a good idea, but it wasn’t… I hadn’t really gotten to the point where I could do more of those types of paintings.

So then when I ended up, as I said earlier, kind of looking around getting ready for, this show and I had the pictures from Philadelphia and I hadn’t really made any panels,  I started just hammering things together and making new canvases to paint on. Then I realized that it was kind of like that painting that I had done, I realized that I needed to tie that painting back into these. So I think I’ll probably also put that painting into the show, as kind of an informative piece to, where it came from, you know?

I’m also going to include this, [points to a picture on the wall] the real nick-knack shelf that inspired that painting, in the show. Since I’ll be moving it’s not going to be hanging in my room like it normally is. And that’s going to be kind of an established piece on the wall that’ll include all the real relics.

I think that it’ll be informative, because you know seeing the studio you see how these little pieces make up a big hole in the paintings. They’re obscured a little bit more. But I think seeing that in the gallery will let people see, the collective nature of what these paintings represent. Collecting a lot of different things and bring them together, ideally into a whole. Which, again, is what, you know, good design is, really. Solving a lot of problems in the most efficient way possible.  I remember Shaun Richards told me, we had this conversation as I thought about my painting’s design problems, and he said he always thought about his paintings like they were puzzles. Like, he was trying, he was trying to solve, you know. And that’s really not too different of a way to look at things, you know?

Updated to correct transcription errors.

I Would Love You Over by Luke Miller Buchanan opens tonight at Rebus Works at 7pm the show will hang through September 24th.

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