Swampscott artist: from comics to Venice

SWAMPSCOTT – His father didn’t approve when Richard Buckley was in elementary school and started selling comics to the newspaper.But through years in advertising, driving cabs and in academia, Richard Buckley continued making art. And beginning next week, three of his paintings will hang in the Venice Biennale.”They only do it every two years, supposedly that makes it very special, so they tell me … I don’t know,” Buckley said at his home in Swampscott Thursday. “We’ll see what it does.”The 56th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale is held across the city of Venice, Italy, between May and November. This year, there will be 89 countries represented, and the biennale also includes festivals in film, architecture, dance, music and theater, according to the biennale webpage. The international exhibition began in 1895 and has showcased most of the art world’s most well-known artists as well as introduced the public to art movements such as cubism, surrealism and pop art.Buckley said he always loved art, but hid his developing talent from a father who “had scorn for art and artists.” But Buckley’s father died when Buckley was 12. So Buckley continued painting and drawing while studying at Harvard, the George Vesper School of Fine Arts and The School of The Museum of Fine Arts.He entered advertising in 1963, but painting remained a passion. He was named as one of the Commonwealth’s top 100 young painters in the contest in the late 1960s, then was in an exhibit of the Commonwealth’s Top 10 artists at a gallery on Newbury Street.So he decided to quit his job as a creative director at an ad agency and become an artist-painter during the day while driving a cab at night. It didn’t work out too well financially for a man with a wife, two kids, a car and a house in the suburbs, Buckley said. One night he picked up a former colleague who said he was looking for a freelancer, and Buckley went back into advertising.But he didn’t really love it, so he thought he’d try academia. He became chairman of the graphics department at the New England School of Art in 1969, then became a teacher at University of New Hampshire. “I was looking for something ?higher’ than advertising, something that was more than just a business,” Buckley said. “So I got into academia, and it wasn’t any different.”So he started his own advertising firm in 1973, landing clients such as Fairchild Semiconductor and Harvard Business School. He has subsequently worked independently as a freelancer.But he kept painting and taking photographs. Although his early work was more representational, his apartment is primarily filled with work from his most recent period of abstract expressionism, a series he calls Essence.In this series, of which he is at #162, he essentially creates abstract images by spreading acrylic paint over a board or canvas using his hands, fingers or by applying the paint directly from its tube. This creates smears of “brushstrokes” with varying thickness of paint, and canvases are often dampened before painting so that the paint “blooms” as if it were a watercolor or spilled ink. The resulting images are variable: some are very geometric, others resemble Chinese characters, others are vaguely reminiscent of silhouettes.Others see something else. Buckley said he recently realized that 85 percent of his work is sold to professional women between the ages of 30 and 50, which he said a fellow artist attributed to his paintings “being all about sex.”Three paintings from this series will hang in Venice.Buckley, unfortunately, will not get to visit them – he joked that only the paintings could afford to go to Italy. But ever the advertising pro, he is hoping that he can use the experience to get represented by a gallery in New York or Boston.Meanwhile, he had an advertising project he finished at the end of the week.