Jim Buckels

Buckels’ paintings, lithographs, and serigraphs juxtapose a precisely detailed reality with an otherworldly enchantment that both dazzles the eye and captures the imagination. Focusing on architectural landscapes that combine the real and the surreal, Buckles creates the world as we wish it were.

When you look at his work, there’s a déjà vu quality of “I’ve been there” or “I’ve seen that building”, but it’s even better than you remember it.

Most of my paintings are real places,” he says. “You know how you look at a building and it’s so perfect, but then you think, what if that building were on the other side of the Mediterranean, or on the other side of the street where the light is better. You can always make it better.” And he does.

It’s this painstaking attention to detail that sets Buckels’ work apart, for one doesn’t often associate meticulous clarity with Neo-Surrealism. Buckels describes his work as “Metaphysical Landscapes.”

“It’s like a holistic philosophy,” he explains. “Holistic medicine is a spiritual rather than scientific way of looking at medicine, and metaphysical is a spiritual way of looking at the physical world.” You don’t just look at Buckels’ fanciful visions, you enter them. Like a magnet, the mystical aura and representational perspective draws you in, making you wonder what has or is about to happen.

As one New York critic recently noted, his pictures “tell stories that linger in memory long after one has viewed them, hinting at truths that lie just below the surface of the seen world.”

Jim Buckels has had one man shows in Boston, New York, Washington DC, Atlanta, Des Moines, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Tokyo. His images have been in publication since 1987.