Courtney Buckland isn’t exactly shy, nor particularly self-conscious. She is however, made slightly anxious by the recent adornment thrust upon her work.

Numerous times throughout our interview, she pauses to clarify and expand upon her words, her airy laugh a consistent forebearer leading to colored tangents surrounding her latest three-part series, an ode to disposable notions, feelings, possessions and even canvas forms themselves.

The Breckenridge-soaked transplant’s dialect embeds itself between the vernacular roots of greater metropolises. New York and Chicago stay on her lips as she harkens to her early upbringing and family’s influence; her mother a ballet teacher and her father an eclectic marketing consultant having given her the map but not the destination of a family’s inclination toward self-expression. Between adages of her latest trifecta “Cheap Sex and Cardboard,” “How Much for your Ass” and “Trapped in Your Pretty Little Head,” she digresses into sentimental chapters of her upbringing’s travels, always navigating back to the specific questions and subjects at hand.

“All of these I did while recovering,” says Buckland as she moves her long red hair to reveal the remnants of a nasty bicycle accident three weeks prior. “They were either painted in my bed, or on my floor – and trashy T.V. was on the screen – volume off, the entire time. All they air is sex and skin and labels. The same smiles. The same tits. The same hair. All of it.”

The disdain is apparent. “It’s all the same, and so expendable and so superficial. Low-budget-cheap-fame-whore ‘talent’. Cheap shitty advertising and cheap recycled material. It’s T.V. for the youth of America.”

Buckland’s mind seems to always move two paces ahead, perhaps a reaction to the concussion suffered, or perhaps her natural tendency to use what is an obvious wit in tandem with an above-average communicative intuition. She turns questions in repeated circles, but instead of wandering, it seems to be the intentional method of dissecting her own work through monitored interpretation of the individual perceptions of those around her.

Says the artist, “I was recovering when I did these, and as much as there was an inspiration for each individual piece, they were done with a common theme and any exact explanation for each piece has been slightly lost with the side effects of my concussion. With the lack of perfectionism I usually carry around with me, and lots of pills, it just started to flow more than anything. I’ve never worked so fast and thought so little. It was a very strange haze I was in.”

“So I’m bruised and battered and covered in scrapes and scars. And all of this shit is on my T.V. as it’s being rerun over and over. That’s when hot chicks and cheap sex turned into a theme. Cardboard is used to convey the cheap, manufactured feel as well as cheap acrylic.”

And although Buckland sounds impassioned, even at times embittered toward the consumer culture that so well infiltrated her walls during her recovery, her signature laugh always lags behind, and with it a sense that the artist isn’t far from being able to find humor in society’s crass tendencies.

She acknowledges that her art is still seemingly unknown but to a chosen few tastemakers in the mountain snow bastion of Summit County, Colorado, and it’s not lost upon those that are familiar with her work that she walks a deliberate path in announcing any sort of arrival on the scene. Thus far, Courtney Buckland’s insistence and inkling have been to spend her time working on commissioned pieces with word of mouth serving in place of self-promotion and web check-out carts; a natural progression for an artist who freely admits that she is still evolving and growing with each new work.

As conversation concludes, she talks little of the future, other than the immediacy of new projects on her late evening’s agenda. A frenetic energy surrounds her and she’s off to do what she seemingly does best. Unapologetic expression on her terms without constraint or expectation.

Nicholas M.H. | RootSpeak Staff

Nicholas M.H. is one of the founders of both RootSpeak and the site's parent publisher, Truth&Rights Collective. Between giving his fellow editors a hard time, he fills the remaining hours of each day with his own writing and excursions into the worlds of media cooperatives and creative consulting for various inspired upstarts.

Read more by Nicholas M.H. on RootSpeak