Greg McGee, Arts Adviser for Dream Catcher, international arts journal
By Greg McGee
Dream Catcher magazine's art editor Greg McGee on Joseph Bucklow, this issue's artist:
Using imagination, memory and photography as sources of inspiration, Bucklow’s paintings capture landscapes, urban scenes and the people within them imbued with a stark drama. The images tend to be brooding, half-seen poetic visions that blur the lines between nostalgia and history, theatre and reality.
These semi-imagined settings loom like light within a dream, offering a glimpse into worlds that are at once familiar and unknown. The work evokes a faded recollection, and the fragmented pleasure that can come with that, but also the unease and dynamism of the unexplored, providing enough visual information for the viewer to find their bearings whilst simultaneously surrendering to uncertainty and questioning. Rather than slavishly mimic a scene or compete with the camera lens, Bucklow lasers in on the intersection between certitude and recall, that flitting convergence between the definite and the question.
Wordworth defined poetry as , "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” For Bucklow, it’s not the emotion or the recollection of it, but the painterly slippage between the two that inculcates his creativity with a David Lynch-esque chiaroscuro. Poet David Lewis Paget, in his 2005 poem ‘Half Remembered’ guides us through memories as if he is observing a previous life, ‘another life's colours’:
“We touch things we see not
And know things we know not
And dream of sweet things that
We’ve not set in store.
We say things we think not
And do things we do not
And wonder at wonders
We’ve wondered before…”
It is this yearning surrealism in revisiting reminiscences that Bucklow's paintings strive for: inaccuracy, enhancement and exaggerations, all products of selective memories, all providing subject matter for paintings that pulse with gestural brushwork and ligne claire, experimental wit and claustrophobic foreboding, expressing with Hitchcockian theatricality the notion that though what we remember is, like Ozymandias’ statue, transient, the memories themselves cling while we live.
Here's Dream Catcher:
https://www.dreamcatchermagazine.co.uk/
Here’s available paintings from Joseph Bucklow:
https://www.josephbucklow.com/availablepaintings
Joseph Bucklow is a British artist, living and working in Notting Hill, London. Joseph is also a member of the artist-run Bakery Gallery in Islington where his work is currently on display.
‘ Using imagination, memory and photography as sources of inspiration, my paintings capture landscapes, urban scenes and the people within them imbued with a strong cinematic and theatrical influence. The images tend to be brooding, half-seen poetic visions that blur the lines between nostalgia and history, theatre and reality.
These semi-imagined settings are transmitted to the viewer and offer a glimpse into worlds that are at once familiar and unknown. The work evokes a faded recollection, but also the unease and dynamism of the unexplored, providing enough visual information for the viewer’s acquisition of bearings but opportunity for uncertainty and questioning.
My painting features both an illustrative use of line and detail along with expressive and gestural brushwork, layered to construct these spaces within which the mind can dwell and hear itself echo.
The images encourage the viewer to dwell upon the forgotten and mundane elements of our surroundings whilst elevating the sense of solitude and the peace found in seclusion and present an opportunity for the intensely private moments often experienced within a vast space.’
J Bucklow, 2025
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Jackson’s Art Prize Longlist, March 2026.
Jackson’s Art Prize Longlist, March 2025.
ACS Studio Prize Shortlist, July 2023.
ACS Studio Prize Shortlist, August 2022.
ACS Studio Prize Finalist. October 2021
ACS Studio Prize Shortlist. July 2019
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Anthologia Vol.VII - Joseph Bucklow, The Violet Hour, Feb 2026
Emerging Landscape Painting Today, Messums London, Oct 2024
Reverence, Purslane online show. July 2024.
Promises to Keep, The Violet Hour online show. June 2024.
Mise-en-Scène, Act 2 — 44 Hallam St, London, Brushes with Greatness. Jan - June 2024.
The Peace of Wild Things, The Violet Hour. Nov 2023.
Ode to Autumn, The Violet Hour. Oct 2023.
Knowle Hill, The Split Gallery, London. July 2023.
Mise-en-Scène, Act 1 — 44 Hallam St, London, Brushes with Greatness. June - Dec 2023.
Synergy - Platform 1 Gallery, London. Nov/Dec 2022.
Gertrude Presents - The Truman Brewery, London. Oct 2022.
Young Once Only - All Saints Road, The Violet Hour. May 2022.
Constant Stars - Online Group Show, The Violet Hour. Dec 2021.
In a New Light - Online Group Show, Art City Works. Aug 2021.
Young Art Collector ‘Selects’, Online Group Show. July 2021.
Green Fires - Online Group Show, The Violet Hour. Apr 2021.
Momentum - Online Group Show, The Holy Art. Feb 2021.
On the Strangest Sea - Online Group Show, The Violet Hour. Nov 2020.
This is The House we Built. Feb, 2020
MA Graduate Show - City & Guilds London Art School. Sept 2019
Education
MA Fine Art, City and Guilds London Art School - 2019.
BA History, University of Glasgow - 2010.