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Check out David Buckingham’s Artwork

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Today we’d like to introduce you to David Buckingham.

David, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
I never intended to become an Angeleno or a metal sculptor. I was an advertising creative director in New York City when I crossed paths with Ray “Cowboy” Kelly and his Rivington School in the early 90s. The Rivington School was a band of metal-working misfits operating out of an abandoned gas station on the corner of 2nd Street and Avenue B in the East Village, back when the EV was an urban nightmare of abandoned buildings, populated by anarchists, squatters, junkies, criminals and punk rockers. Soon found myself in an office on Madison Avenue by day and welding crude, brutalist metal furniture in Ray’s Lower East Side basement by night. My first piece was a stool for a potter friend, complete with her name welded into it, and she called it “folk art”. I was pleased, but when I relayed this comment to Ray he spit on the floor and coldly replied, “Buckingham, always remember: art is just the last three letters in fart!”, which put a decade-long fear of anything that could be considered ‘art’ into me. I left NYC for a job in Australia in ’95, continuing my metal furniture practice at night and on weekends while writing TV commercials by day. Developed a serious heroin habit and came to Los Angeles for a 10-day detox but instead ended up down & out on the streets of Skid Row, then in county jail, where I was sentenced to a 16-month outpatient program. It was during this time I discovered the Mojave desert with its abundance of colorful discarded metal junk and a machine called a plasma cutter. Made my first attempt at “art” in July 2002, in a friend’s backyard in Altadena, thinking it would be a failure and I’d go back to making furniture.

I made a crude Easter Island-ish head that became a series of heads, then came the movie line series, then I moved on to making guns, and before I knew it the sculpture bug had sunk its fangs into my neck and I was a full-time sculptor. Had my first solo show, at age 46, in 2005, and I’ve been on it like stink on a monkey ever since. Never looked back. Now working ten times harder for ten times less and I’m ten times happier. What a ride!

We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
All my work is made from found metal. All colors are original as found; nothing’s painted. I roam the high and low deserts of California in search of battered and beaten agriculture equipment, trucks, school buses, etc. I look for metal that has had a previous life, with the scars to prove it. (Like me). I’m sixty years old, and I’ve had American pop culture pounded into me for almost six decades, and now it’s starting to come back out, albeit filtered through my own admittedly skewed perspective. I was an advertising writer for 20 years, so you’ll see lots of text work, wordplay, movie references, slang, etc. I love text, and I love madness, and when I get them together it’s magic. Like metal, words are malleable; bending and reshaping them can give them a completely different meaning. Much of my work is not serious, -if I didn’t have a sense of humor I’d be in my grave- but I’m dead serious about the work, if that makes any sense. I approach my art the same way I approached writing a TV commercial: love it, hate it, I don’t care, just have a reaction. Although metal sculpture is my sole source of income, I don’t make things to “sell,” I make work I’d like to see on my own walls. And I love it when people look at my work and say “Cool!” Mission accomplished.

Have things improved for artists? What should cities do to empower artists?
It’s a bitch to make a living as an artist, and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. And I’m certainly no policy-maker, but perhaps what cities can do to empower artists is to ensure they have a place to work. All the artists I knew in the “Arts District” (note the quote marks) have been pushed out and my formerly gritty studio hood in DTLA is being rapidly gentrified; instead of crack hos and dead bodies we are now overrun with (horrors!) art galleries and hipsters. Our rent has increased and it’s only a matter of time until we get the boot. I feel like a polar bear on an ice floe in an ever-warming sea. You know it’s over when your neighborhood gets a name, and they’re now calling our hood the “Southern Arts District”, or SAD for short. Barf.

Do you have any events or exhibitions coming up? Where would one go to see more of your work? How can people support you and your artwork?
It’s easy. You make an appointment to visit my DTLA studio, A/K/A the Terrordome. I meet you a few blocks away, blindfold you and put noise-canceling headphones on you. You are driven to my studio in the trunk of a car. Inside, the blindfold is removed, and you gasp at the sight before you: an unhinged maniac in tattered Carhardts and work boots, standing in a grotty studio, surrounded by 18 years of free-association metalwork. The walls are chock-a-block with a jumble of text works, gang signs, large metal guns, homeless signs, and the detritus of downtown Los Angeles. There are unfinished sculptures lying about. The air is thick with the smell of molten steel. Punk rock plays loudly. I start telling crazy back stories about the work. You marvel at the sheer insanity of it all and say “You got a weird brain, man.” I say “Yeah, I know. Everybody says that, but it works for me.” You promise to buy something, but you’ve gotta talk to your wife first, and we both know it’ll never happen. You leave to go back to your air-conditioned office, and I go back to work, grinding away till the wee hours. OR, if you don’t like the idea of riding in a car’s trunk blindfolded, you can come to my solo show “Nobody Likes a Smartass” with Caldwell Snyder Gallery in St. Helena CA.  The show opens on February 23rd and I’ll have a blindfold for you.

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