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Fiona Buchanan, Hondai Cilantro (2019) 24 x 22” oil and pastel on panel. 
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Fiona Buchanan artworks: top left: Hondai Cilantro (2019) 24 x 22” oil and pastel on panel; top centre: No Coasting (2019) 24 x 24” oil and pastel on panel; top right: Lynn Shore Drive (2019) 24” x 24”, oil and pastel on panel; top right: Bottom left: Old Air (2020) 16″ x 12″; bottom centre: Untitled Mud (2020), oil on 10″ x 8″; bottom right: Shy Car (2020) 10″ x 8″.
The first time I talked to Fiona Buchanan about her work, we considered the luxury of ugly painting. The second time, we discussed the relationship between the Socratic Method and her art practice at large. We further bonded as fan-girls of Issy Wood. Wood, a young British painter, builds metaphors and cringe-based comedies through a sequence of oddly atmospheric paintings that combine portraiture with the glossy detritus of auction-house catalogues. To understand Wood’s work, we agreed, you have to look at the continuum of her practice rather than isolate any single painting as a standalone masterwork. Although this may be true of many artists, it feels especially relevant not only to Wood’s oeuvre but also to Buchanan’s.
In her paintings, Buchanan is acutely conscious of not wanting to pander to the eye in any conventional, beauty queen kind of way. Her palette is notable for its difficult combinations and non-decorative hues. She describes it as “semi-garish,” even when it leans toward muddy, referencing synthetic food, artificial substances, and what she calls the ugliness of anti-nature. Buchanan also resists dictating meaning. Her work avoids linear narrative and remains suspended in a space of potential, something she describes as a kind of non-space. Seeing her practice as a continuum of questions, one leading to the next, Buchanan’s approach mirrors the structure of Socratic dialogue: question, analyze, refine.
With her loose hand, off-key colours, and quirky subject matter, it would be easy to assume Buchanan paints in a casual or intuitive way. In fact, she is intensely focused on formal and material concerns. In recent works, her oil painting has become even more technical and reductive. The Socratic goal of identifying general characteristics through particular examples is echoed in her treatment of light and atmosphere. This emphasis aligns her more with painters like J. M. W. Turner, the Barbizon school, or the Hudson River School, where the rendering of light becomes the central subject.
Buchanan is working toward a depiction of non-space using a painting language that is as concise as possible. The concept of non-space carries the riddle-like logic of a Zen koan. Like a koan, the question and its non-answer collapse into abstraction. Through her ongoing process of questioning and refinement, Buchanan’s non-space becomes a mood constructed from light and shadow, shaped through the removal of unnecessary edges and boundaries.
The painting Shy Car (2020) provides just enough visual information for the viewer to read upholstery and drapery as signs of a generic domestic interior. There may also be teeth or dentures. Hondai Cilantro (2019) incorporates cinematic god rays and a glowing sunset reflected across the body of the car. When I asked Buchanan why she started painting cars, she explained that it was a way to challenge both genre expectations and her own traditional art training. She had just returned from a road trip and a car seemed like as good a subject as any. The car became the vehicle, both literally and metaphorically, for her return to representation after a period focused on abstraction. Over time, the cars took on additional meaning as surrogate figures with distinct personalities, situated in her signature post-apocalyptic environment.
Another shift is underway in the studio. Buchanan has given herself a new, self-described “useless” challenge: to paint images that occupy a space neither landscape nor interior. In these new works, her domestic environments become even more ambiguous, resisting any reading as a box with four walls. Everyday objects have replaced the cars while retaining a similar function. While the cars were imagined, these objects are painted from observation. Still, a cool detachment remains. As part of her effort to avoid both sentimentality and specificity, Buchanan chooses objects that are impersonal, often sourced from random images found online.
Surrealism plays a role, though in a way that feels thwarted and uneasy, aligned with the emotional tone of the present moment. “Squashiness” is a recurring quality in Buchanan’s subjects, from abandoned cars to thrift store armchairs and studio mugs. Rendered in her limited and melancholic palette, this squashiness becomes something like the surrealism of emojis gone slightly wrong. I do not use the word “cute” pejoratively. It is the contrast between soft, deformed forms and her sombre, possibly dystopian settings that generates the eerie playfulness in the work. The small scale of her recent paintings intensifies this effect. Shy Car is a brushy and compact 10 by 8 inches. Untitled Mud is similarly sized. Their modest dimensions soften the imagined sonic register I associate with the work. You lean in, as if listening to a discordant phrase of music played in pianissimo.
About the artist: Fiona Buchanan was born in Swampscott, Massachusetts and received a BFA in painting from Boston University. She has participated in residencies at Yale Norfolk summer school of art, the Wassaic Project Residency Program, and the Jentel Artist Residency. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. More information can be found here: Fionabuchanan.net and on Instagram: @firnonbonorco.
About the writer: Jennifer Mawby is a contemporary artist and sometimes curator and art writer with a focus on projects for artists using accessible language. Jennifer is the co-founder and director of Vantage Art Projects. Her work can be found here: www.jjtmstudio.com and on Instagram: @jenniferjeanmawby.