By Sara Anne Donnelly
Photos by Tara Rice
Anne Buckwalter’s unassuming pale-green cape blends into its woodsy Durham plot. The interior, though, bursts forth like one of her paintings, with brightly colored walls and woodwork, granny-chic floral patterns, and cheeky little Easter eggs strewn about. In the kitchen, yellowy and blue-gray cabinets, topped with a delft-style tile backsplash Buckwalter painted lime green, are juxtaposed with a wooden dining chair she decorated in the fashion of Pennsylvania Dutch folk art, with stylized flowers and a woman’s bare bust. A collection of works depicting the temptation of Adam and Eve (with and without their fig leaves) camouflages into pink botanical “wallpaper” she painted in a powder room. Meanwhile, in the tangerine living room, a black-and-white photograph taken at an S&M club hangs above a pair of vintage porcelain chicken lamps perched on a pair of speakers.
Buckwalter’s paintings of maximalist, matronly domestic interiors play up these racy-folksy themes. The scenes are rendered flatly, like collages, in vivid gouache paints that absorb rather than reflect light, imparting a dollhouse stillness. Strong rectilinear lines on furnishings, woodwork, and decor parcel rooms into tidy compartments Buckwalter fills with a scramble of antique patterns. Amid the sensory overload, the monochrome softness of a naked body, body part, or suggestive piece of halved fruit becomes, ironically, the only place the eye can relax. “Every painting plays hide-and-seek, double-take games. Making us look closer, longer,” curator Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer wrote in an essay accompanying Buckwalter’s first solo museum show, at Rockland’s Farnsworth Art Museum, staged last year. “Suddenly, we are interlopers, trespassers, titillated snoops who’ve stumbled upon some strategically planted privacy.”
