KEN BUHLER | KIM UCHIYAMA
BEAUTIFUL LAND

NOVEMBER 1 - DECEMBER 20, 2024

This essay was written for the iteration of Beautiful Land exhibited at the Anderson Gallery at Drake University in September 2024, and for the accompanying catalog produced by the Anderson Gallery.

It is said that a painting is a series of decisions, representing the conclusion to a flow-chart of choices made in the process of working. The clarity of that definition is overshadowed by the fact that each choice is backgrounded by its own configuration of factors: what an artist paints is connected to all they have seen and imagined; the scale of a work derives from myriad sensations of what feels physically “right”, and each mark is dependent on the materials the artist has made available to themselves, at that moment and over the years. When traced back to a possible origin, these variables become obscured and ultimately hit against a point at which the artist’s decisions simply can’t be other than they are – they are innate. Existing external to either conscious decisions or unconsciously derived subject matter, these intrinsic qualities as reflected in an artwork point to the parameters of an artist’s individual universe, to an entire way of seeing and being in the world.

The pairing of Kim Uchiyama’s and Ken Buhler’s work in this exhibition serves as a compelling, if almost inadvertent, exploration into this elusive aspect of “innateness” as conveyed through painting.  The clearest link between the two artists is simply their shared origin of spending early years in Iowa. Uchiyama was born in Des Moines, where she grew up and began Fine Art studies at Drake University; Buhler’s family moved to Sioux City from Kansas when he was 13, where he lived until undertaking his undergraduate degree at the University of Iowa. The opportunity to view their work together is counterintuitively made richer by the consideration that neither artist directly addresses the particulars of Iowa’s cities or landscapes in their paintings.  Instead, each artist – working within the great freedom of abstraction - uses differing means to convey imaginative responses to a sweeping range of sensations and subjects. And yet, within the spectrum of these artists’ interests emerges a sustained engagement with a pictorial space that is both certain and vast, expressive of indelible impressions of their first home, the Beautiful Land of the exhibition’s title.

The complex spaces of Kim Uchiyama’s finely calibrated abstractions have been built over the past several years through a language of precision based almost exclusively on the fundamental form of the horizontal line. Consisting of stacked parallel bands of either solid or slightly modulated color, these works allude to the farthest illusionistic point possible in a painting – the land meeting the sky – while simultaneously adhering to and reinforcing the surface of the unyielding picture plane.  There is both a restraint and grandeur to Uchiyama’s approach: the bands of color within each work are similar in width, but not identical; their colors are painstakingly specific and wholly active in relation to each other, yet never stray far from an earth-tone palette; the outward momentum of what could be a “runaway” composition is balanced by the vertical format of their support.  In other words, the mesmerizing sense of dynamism they create is inseparable from the solidity they establish.

The grounded-ness that prevails in Uchiyama’s paintings contributes in their viewing to what feels like a moment of taking stock, of orienting oneself within a landscape-like visual field.  In this reading we are the vertical, scanning the horizontal in a gesture that feels primary, age-old and deeply human. This sensation of “first-sights” is linked, perhaps, to the fascination Uchiyama has held throughout her life with ancient Greek and Roman sites. She describes a process of gathering impressions from visits to ruins as being central to many of her works, absorbing the feeling of sun-warmed stones and the smell of salt, visually cataloguing the varied tones of the earth below, and above all trying to understand the exactness of the light – whether noon-focused, tempered by cloud, or slanting into rose and gold - to which all other variables of the landscape are subject. The resulting distilled color-combinations of Uchiyama’s abstractions evoke a time, or state of mind, in which the world and all impressions we might have of it are infused with stately newness.

Uchiyama’s paintings suggest a distinct physicality, despite the subtlety of their surface. Works like Tempo Rubato and Interval, which were indirectly inspired by walks along the ever-changing Hudson River during cooped-up pandemic times, reveal through color contrast the brushwork that underlies even monochromatic passages. Uchiyama doesn’t use a roller – or remarkably, a level – when painting. Far from moving graphically over the painting, her process is one of entering with a deeply rooted intuition of mind and body into the spaces she creates. Architect and historian Kyle Dugdale evoked the term “spiritual shelter” in relation to Uchiyama’s work at a recent gallery talk.[i] It is a perfect, if ambiguous, description of what she is building in paintings like Nocturne. The four bands of color that structure this work - opaque to transparent variations on pale turquoise, indigo and sienna – convey the exact sensation of light departing and color transitioning to shadow, while supporting the viewer’s gaze somewhere between certainty below and beauty above.  

If Uchiyama’s abstractions invite a meditative engagement with an outwardly-extending space, it could be said that Ken Buhler’s work brings our attention straight upwards, to a deeply recessive field that echoes the boundary-less space above. “Big Sky” cliches are best avoided in reference to either of these artists’ paintings, as they threaten to oversimplify the conversation the works maintain with other influences, including historical and formal concerns. It is undeniable, however, that within the topographical stillness of the country’s center one’s vision is drawn to the spectacle of the sky’s vaulted drama, and both artists refer in conversation to memories of the Midwestern sky. As Buhler has written:

“As a child, my family lived near the Chisolm Trail on the very edge of Wichita, Kansas, where the paved roads gave way to open fields. When storms were moving across the plains, I liked to ride my bike to the end of the block, where I would lie down on my back, and all I could see were the tops of the swaying grass around me and the darkening sky with its odd greenish hue.”

The image of the child-artist looking upwards in complete absorption of the gathering clouds is a poignant reminder that for most of us, as mainly grounded creatures, the sky behaves as the first active two-dimensional surface we might observe, it is the original picture plane.

Buhler also cites a later and equally powerful experience at an observatory in Texas when he was able to see further into a night sky he had always loved. While based in a language of abstraction, paintings like Dark Sky and Origin of the Milky Way clearly echo the impact of this encounter. Through seamless but dramatic chromatic shifts of glowing blues to bottomless blacks, and less expected airy greens to vermillion, Buhler in this series of works creates richly atmospheric visual environments punctuated with incident. Tiny and large geometric shapes and sparks of metallic gold leaf are here assertively material in contrast to the color-energy that surrounds them, they form tenuous patterns and imprecise grids that lead the eye deeper into a pictorial space seemingly ungoverned by a standard earthly orientation.

The experience of seeing an eclipse comes to mind in viewing Buhler’s work. Not necessarily in terms of their imagery, although their abstract spaces sometimes allude to situations of alignment and overlap, but because they re-create an encounter with a scale that feels familiar even in its unbelievability, as when we make sense through our own bodies and minds the actual distance between the earth and moon and sun. Beyond evocations of the starry night sky, Buhler’s paintings serve as a means of bringing consciousness to bear on a confrontation with vastness; they are less about recording an impression of a space than the moment at which our memories, associations and desires move in to make sense of it.

In discussing his work Buhler has referred to a favorite passage by essayist and nature writer Barry Lopez:

“The physical landscape is baffling in its ability to transcend whatever we would make of it. It is as subtle in its expression as turns of the mind, and larger than our grasp; and yet it is still knowable. The mind, full of curiosity and analysis, disassembles a landscape and then reassembles the pieces–the nod of a flower, the colour of the night sky, the murmur of an animal–trying to fathom its geography.”[ii]

It is in this space of encounter that Buhler has addressed a range of subjects and starting points, from beloved Irish landscapes in works like Ballinglen, to a series titled Birdlands based on avian life, or to Elizabethan wildflowers in Shakespeare’s Gardens. The Faithful Compass Series evolved during the pandemic, when Buhler learned and began incorporating Venetian paper-marbling techniques into works on paper. The distinctive traditional patterns might at first seem visually tangential to Buhler’s interests, until we visualize their making in barely controlled swirls and swells of color floating on the surface of a water bath. As with all of Buhler’s works, whether on canvas or watercolor on paper, the marbling reflects a process of receptive engagement with materials in which spaces and subjects are allowed to emerge, unfurling into fields of possibility.

Both Uchiyama and Buhler’s works seem shaped by a gentle optimism, central to their shared interest in origins, and in first and fundamental sensations. Our sight is cradled in the spaces they create, which in their varied order, wildness, incisiveness and splendor, could not be different than what they are.

Christina Kee 2024

[1] Gallery talk with Kim Uchiyama and Kyle Dugdale held at Helm Contemporary on June 18, 2024 and accompanying the exhibition Loggia which was on view from May 30 – June 29, 2024.

[1] Barry Lopez, Artic Dreams, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1986, p. xxii-xxiii.