Christopher Bucklow - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Christopher Bucklow, also known as Chris Bucklow, was born Christopher Paul Bucklow on the first of June, 1957, in Flixton, Urmston, Lancashire, England. His parents were Roy and Doreen Bucklow. Roy Bucklow was an architect, but he died before Christopher's first birthday in 1958. Christopher was adopted by his stepfather Alfred Noel Titterington, a businessman in the printing industry, in 1967 and used the name Chris Titterington until the beginning of his life as an artist in 1989, when he was 32 years old.

Bucklow's childhood was spent in Flixton. In his early teens he became passionately interested in the paintings of the Impressionist painter Alfred Sisley and he made Sisley-influenced landscape paintings around his home. He also made hitch-hike visits to South Wales to visit sites that Sisley had painted. In 1975, he left home to study art history at Leicester Polytechnic. He continued his interest in Sisley and completed his undergraduate dissertation on the series Sisley made during the floods at Port Marly of 1875. Bucklow also became interested in British watercolours and in Romantic naturalism as a phenomenon in the history of ideas. Under the tuition of Robert Ayers, he also became interested in American painting since 1945 and contemporary art in general.

After Bucklow graduated in 1978 he accepted a post as a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He worked in the Prints and Drawings department. There he researched Romantic works of art on paper and early photography. He also continued his interest in contemporary art and he wrote reviews of contemporary exhibitions for Artscribe magazine, London. During this whole period as a museum curator, he did not make any art himself. He was completely absorbed in the study of the Romantic mind – in particular the developments that led to the rise of landscape in the genre hierarchy of the period. However, he was becoming interested in William Blake and would spend time after hours studying the many wonderful examples of Blake’s work that he was looking after as part of the V&A collection. During these years as a curator, he also continued his early interest in physics and astronomy. These subjects would offer him great consolation and stability- almost as a refuge from his studies of the world of the shifting human values found in the arts. (An analysis of the psychological processes going on during these years can be found in his essay "Rhetoric and Motive in the Writing of Art History; A shapeshifter’s Perspective" in Elizabeth Mansfield Ed., Remaking Art History, Routledge, New York, 2007). Occasionally Bucklow would write articles on art and the new physics for New Scientist magazine, London.

In 1986 Chris Bucklow visited Botswana to observe Halley's comet from the perfect viewing conditions of the Makgadikgadi salt pans. While there, he experienced a revelation about the latent mythological content of Romantic philosophy, and, "in retrospect," says Bucklow, "I see this as the beginning of my trajectory towards beginning to make art." Another element in that shift was the tragic road accident that one of his brothers was involved in that same year, the experience of the aftermath of which prompted him to begin the journal that he has kept to this day. This began as a journal of ideas and dreams and also a diary. It has now become his series of sketchbooks.

In 1988 Bucklow met Susan Percival, his future wife. The following year, together, they took an extended train tour of Italy, and it was there, in Assisi, on the 8th of August, that Chris Bucklow first knew that he would again make art. On their return to England, he began the projects that he would later exhibit in London and New York.