Owen Buffington is Adjunct Instructor in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Arkansas Fort Smith, where he teaches 2D and 3D design. His own art practice reflects his love of geography and architecture and explores how we interact with and in artificial spaces. More of Owen’s work can be found at this website owenbuffington.com.

AAS: Owen, I know you did graduate work at the University of Arkansas, but are you an Arkansas native?

OB: I am not! My family moved around a lot when I was kid, but I spent a significant amount of my teenage years and twenties living in Minnesota. I received a degree in Geography and Urban Studies from Macalester College in 2004, and then spent the next decade or so moving around and working odd jobs. I ended up in Fayetteville around 2009, where I found a lovely community of fellow weirdos, including my longtime partner, Sara. I was able to get into the MFA program here and graduated with an emphasis in drawing in 2017. Since then, we took a short tour of the Midwest - two years in Lincoln, Nebraska and two years in Chicago, Illinois - before returning to the area in 2022. Over the last two years, I have been working as an adjunct instructor at the University of Arkansas Fort Smith and teaching community education classes for both Creative Community Center in Fayetteville and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville.

AAS: What were some of your interests as a kid and did you know back then that you would become a teacher and professional artist?

OB: I was lucky to grow up in a family with a lot of artists - in the broad sense including musicians, writers, woodworkers, textile makers, etc. - but also a lot of teachers/care workers. Strangely, I didn’t grow up thinking I would be either, and I took a strange and circuitous route to get here. But obviously, their influence played an enormous role when I was later convincing myself that this is something I could do. I think, most importantly, they showed me that creativity and curiosity can be woven into all aspects of life. 
A few childhood and teenage interests come to mind. Dick Tracy comics - I believe I have read through the whole arc including the weird 1970’s era stories and Pogo comics as well. My grandparents in rural Colorado had collections of both as well as illustrated books. One of my favorites is still Paget’s Sherlock Holmes illustrations. Catching lizards. This is when I lived in Arizona for a time. My siblings and I got pretty good at it, too. Strangely, I went through a bottle collecting phase? I completely forgot about this, but recently unearthed an old box full of antique bottles wrapped in tissue paper. I might have to start that one up again. Fantasy novels. The majority of which don’t really hold up today, but at the time, they ate up an enormous amount of imagination. And later, through my older brother and his friends, I got into punk rock and all the activities that go along with it - playing music poorly, xeroxing flyers, etc.

AAS: Your work was just exhibited in the UAFS Arts and Design Faculty Biennial and last year at Mount Sequoyah, among many other places. I am guessing it must be fun to talk to your students and the public about your work?

OB: It is! For this year’s Biennial, the gallery director Matthew Bailey set up times for us to discuss our work and answer questions. The process of creating a coherent narrative out of the messiness of art making - clashing ideas, intentional decisions versus improvisational, second guessing and backtracking - is often painful. But as a teacher, I hope to demonstrate to students the value of looking back and investigating what it was that we were doing and trying to accomplish. This includes questions, insights, and critique from our peers.

AAS: You had some wonderful pieces in the Faculty Biennial. There was a series of chairs, and each told a story. One of my favorites is (i can't get no) satisfaction. Tell me about the series and that chair in particular.

OB: Thank you! I originally made the work to hang in a duo show, called Sit Tight, with local painter JN Ward at Mount Sequoyah - and a thank you to Jessica DeBari for helping curate! Ward had a great idea to theme the show around the idea of waiting rooms. My contributions were these five waiting rooms chairs that I call “monuments to unfulfilled desire.”
Each drawing is centered around a different style of waiting room chair with an arrangement of different objects sitting on top. The chairs are shown to be attached to the wall through hanging different mechanisms (rope, hooks, wood, etc.) that reference the Shaker tradition of hanging unused furniture for maximum utility of space. The text in each work comes from either two sources; a boomer-era song that is commonly heard in waiting room sound systems (which also give each work their titles) and a selection from a Shaker gift song. All components (text, objects, chair restraints) and their arrangements were chosen to play into the theme of desires that remain unfulfilled, repressed, poorly (or weirdly?) met, confused, counterproductive or even self-destructive, unexplored or ignored, obsessed over but never realized, etc. In other words, these are monuments to “stuckness” and our desire for a certain something that remains ambiguous and out of reach.  
i (can’t get no) satisfaction is the fanciest chair, one that I imagine belonging in a psychiatrist's office. The objects and their arrangement are then meant to loosely play with ideas of psychoanalysis in strange convoluted, and (hopefully!) humorous ways. The title and majority of the text comes from the Rolling Stones’ classic - THE song about wanting things - bounded by a Shaker gift song (which is about the joy that comes from repressing desire).

AAS: Your drawings reflect your fascination with geography and urban architecture. But what I love about your work is that it is not so much about rendering the functional architecture but rather about the representation of the architecture and how we can interact with it through our memories and experiences.

OB: Yeah, my buildings are definitely not functional! And you are right, I am more interested in playing with drawing systems that are used to represent architecture and its surrounding landscape - the blueprint, the plan, the cut-away, the map, etc. It is funny how authoritative lots of straight lines can be. Put a drawing on a grid and we suddenly feel like it is more objective or true. I like using and then pushing against these modes of representation to force in the messiness of life – how we actually live in space.

AAS: Day Job and Night Job made between 2020-2022 are extraordinary architectural drawings and fascinating windows (sorry for the pun) into what I am guessing you must have been experiencing during the pandemic. Tell me about them.

OB: When the pandemic started, I was teaching art at a large residential facility for folks with developmental disabilities in Chicago. These drawings are a record, of sorts, of the new jobs I was given after my classroom was shut down. They come from a simple idea - how could I use drawing to tell the story of my labor.
Of course, there is a giant void in these drawings - the people that I was taking care of along with my amazing coworkers. Of course, there is an important ethical reason for this - I want to respect the privacy of people who have very little of it. But I also wanted these drawings to somehow show how time works in a job - the hours in a shift, counting down the clock, the negotiations we do when balancing tasks versus time, and the idea that this is all repeated again the next day.
I included text as a means of highlighting these repetitions of work. Repetition is often seen as a negative component of life - the idea of endlessly pulling levers on an assembly line - but it can also be thought of as a comforting way of bringing order and meaning to a chaotic life. So, I imagined the text as a prayer of sorts, that would help get me through a difficult shift. I was thinking of the drawing, then, as a Book of Hours, a practical and devotional guide to doing a specific job.

AAS: A Fortress: Evening is another brilliant commentary on urban life, including a stream of consciousness, in a way 

OB: Thank you! The subject of this piece was a Lincoln, Nebraska furniture store I used to drive by periodically when I was teaching evening classes at the county juvenile detention facility. The store would be closed for the evening, and I was always struck by how the bright lit room packed full of furniture somehow felt both incredibly inviting but also closed off and far away. This would mix in with the anxiety I would be feeling as I neared the jail – a feeling that would deepen as you communicate over anonymous intercoms and navigate through endless heavy doors. This drawing is my attempt at capturing some of that tension and uncertainty, but in a landscape.
I also decided it needed physical objects that could work to both invite viewers in but keep them at a distance. The feather flags seemed like the perfect object to do this. There is something vaguely militaristic about their form, like something brought into Uccello’s Renaissance battles, despite their cheerful colors and slogans. The stream-of-consciousness text was a last-minute addition, and honestly, I don’t think it works exactly. But it was my first attempt at bringing language into these drawings, something I am still playing around with today.

AAS: Your skill in drawing is really evident in Ruin. It is filled with incredible detail. Are you that much of a detail-oriented person?

OB: I can definitely be a bit obsessive sometimes. That is what I love about working in colored pencil - I can be maniacal about how I fill in space. I’m not interested in detail for the sake of realism, though, but rather as a means of communicating care and attention - or their darker cousins' obsession and compulsion. Also, in these colored pencil drawings, I first draw with a very hard pencil, like a 2H or so, when laying out the perspective lines. The marks dent the paper, so they remain even after being colored over. You should be able to see them in Ruin if you look closely. This way, the drawing system - in this case, linear perspective - remains somewhat transparent to a viewer.

AAS: I want to ask you about one of your amazing drawings, Untitled, from almost 10 years ago. It is quite different from what you are doing now. Looking back, how do you think your approach to drawing and what motivates you has changed over the years?

OB: This is always a hard question to answer because approaches and interests in art making gets so intertwined with the muddle of everyday living. I can say that there was a shift in my interests around the time I made this piece where I found myself moving away from fantastical spaces to exploring the weirdness of the everyday world. It was a painful transition, and a lot of bad art was made! But I feel like I have finally got to a place where interests and execution have started to gel. Honestly, I also just get bored and find myself wanting to swerve in different directions.

AAS: You’ve worked a lot with youths and with adults with disabilities. What do find rewarding about helping others find their creative self?

OB: It is, of course, personally rewarding to work with people as they develop ideas, build skills, and find creative ways to communicate through art making. But I also believe that equitable access to art education is crucially important in building healthy and vibrant communities. Over the years, I’ve worked with a number of organizations that provide arts education at the community level, including locally at the Creative Community Center in Fayetteville and Crystal Bridges Museum. I also want to give a shout out to the Lux Center for the Arts in Lincoln where I taught for two years. These experiences have been important to me, but more importantly, I hope they have proven valuable to all the people I have worked with over the years.

AAS: Owen, what can we expect next from you?

OB: I am excited to start work on a collaborative project with my colleague and friend, Jay Fox, Director of Book Arts at UAFS. We are in the early stages of making, but already, it has been a joy to get out of my own head and talk through ideas with another human.
Also, this summer, I am excited to be working as a teaching artist for Crystal Bridges Mobile Arts Lab. Along with some wonderful fellow artists, we will be bringing art activities to local communities around the region.