Buck: I’m very nearsighted, and I have no depth perception, so I don’t see the world with backgrounds. I’m always very focused on the frontal figure, so I think that’s part of my world vision, which meant I wasn’t really concerned with backgrounds. I was interested in people, figures, stories, animals. With the collages, I began thinking, “Where do I want this to be? I’m going to create a scene, like a set,” so this came to me. “I want to put something in the desert, out West in America like an old Western movie, but with my funny characters.” I painted this backdrop of a sunset and the masses, and then began cutting out the figures from paintings that I felt were unresolved. The pig and the rabbit come from two very different paintings, as does all of the vegetation. The hat comes from a whole different character. The vegetation comes from an underwater painting, but they all find their place here, and I figured out how to incorporate where the figures are, so that’s a big resolution for me.
Rail: Do these settings come from travels? It feels very Western, with a messy American-ness—guns shooting all over the place without social order. One’s a sheriff, one’s a cowboy with coyotes nearby.
Buck: I suppose that they are American tropes. The Southwest, the cowboy movies, Mother Goose. Usually we think of Mother Goose as being kind, but she’s pissed off here, and Humpty Dumpty is just a mess, and so I like to take all of these things that are givens and turn them on their head. You know, what happens if the man on the moon is wearing sunglasses? What happens if the three blind mice really aren’t blind? It’s rewriting all of these childhood givens.
Rail: Disney makes me so mad. [Laughs] It sounds as though these stories that were part of your childhood—you’re taking them one by one, and putting them in a big, jumbled-up collage. What’s the impetus behind that for you?
Buck: I think that’s what my life has been—just really absurd. I’ve lived all over the place, and I’ve gone all over the place. The people who I met as a young person—none of that really should have happened. Then there was a lot of tragedy in my family, and part of that is the dark side of fairy tales that you see in my work, and the sense that anything can happen. Just because we’re sitting here today doesn’t mean that we’re going to be here tomorrow. In my life, my family, people have come and gone when you least expected it. So I think I have a very deep understanding of how precious it is to live in the moment, to be open to whatever could possibly happen, and to be able to enjoy the absurdity of things. [Laughs]
Rail: To laugh at it! Humor is a big part of who you are—you can see it in your work, and these works of yours are much more humorous than any Mother Goose tale I’ve ever read. Some of those can be quite serious.
Buck: They are lecturing.
Rail: They make you take hold of lessons, so you’re supposed to be on your guard: your choices have consequences. When you jumble it up, you’re also questioning the lessons they convey and what we’re supposed to take away, and questioning if the meaning has been lost. You’re using a lot of satire and humor, in how the characters look and the way you’re outlining them with this black contour. What has humor revealed to you?
Buck: There’s this sense of the mischievous. I think my humor is baked in the bone as a coping mechanism, and I use humor for something I think is unfair or needs to be addressed.
Rail: We can see that in the “Bad Girls”—who are these women? Why is the accentuation on jewels, makeup, or a mask?
Buck: Aren’t we all wearing masks? Knowing when to put your mask on and when to take it off is valuable, and it’s part of being evolved, growing, and protecting yourself. As a woman, you have to protect yourself from judgment, from stereotypes, from lack of agency.
Rail: Can masks also empower?
Buck: The Lone Ranger, Batman—those characters wear masks because they have more power with the mask on, and I think makeup is a mask. I painted lots of women from the 1980s in the “Bad Girls” series with red lipstick and huge hair. The hair almost becomes a construction of itself, like with the beehive hairdo.
Rail: Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: “There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.” I’d like to know more about the carnivalesque throughline in your work. Have you ever been to a carnival?
Buck: I love costumes. It’s a way of slipping into different identities. There were always carnivals in the country in the summertime. The people were a little scary. There were rollercoaster rides, bright lights, and clowns. So those dichotomies are fascinating to me, and I think that you paint what keeps resonating through your life, and I feel as though these figures, these characters, are gifts.
Rail: Since those carnival experiences in your childhood, have you had ones that have marked you as an adult—either the big festive ones that are ritual-based, or ones from county fairs elsewhere, or even Halloween?
Buck: I’m drawn to James Ensor’s work that features those kinds of carnivalesque images. Baltimore is one big carnival, and I spent ten years painting in Baltimore after school painting. John Waters and his characters—I mean, they were in and out of my life. A lot of the people in Baltimore have bravura. It’s the biggest goddamn beehive hairdo you have ever seen in your life! [Laughs] It’s on a woman who is a hundred pounds overweight and she doesn’t care, and she might even just be wearing her bra as her shirt, and it’s part of this lowbrow badge. I spent a lot of time in that world since my studio was down by the wharf, where there were a lot of outrageously colorful characters, and they’ve always been part of my core. They seem to possess a certain joy in just being who they are; they’re not hiding. They have the conviction of who they believe themselves to be and just flaunt a tutu at two o’clock on Saturday afternoon, because they feel like it! It’s close to a childlike rebellion.
Rail: What is the appeal?
Buck: Freedom, freedom, freedom—to be who you want to be, how you want to be, when you want to be. The creative part of me was nurtured, but I’m actually quite rebellious in my own way, and I want to question everything.
Rail: On one hand, the carnival and how you’re describing this environment in Baltimore, there is a freedom to be exactly who you are—but in the carnival, with all of its costumes and masks, it also hides who you might be. There is an innocence to the child’s pranks and laughter, but when you become more mature, suddenly some of that laughter can become rather wicked.
Another point about your work that you’ve made in the past is that, as a result of going through these dichotomies of the carnival—of the masks, of the hiding, of the revealing—there’s a sense of optimism that you want to convey in your work.
Buck: There were a lot of artists who used the carnivalesque, but they were deeply depressed. I use it as a way of making the world lighter, because I see huge problems in the world, and I think right now I’m terrified at the vulgarity and the violence and the lack of respect for our shared humanity. I’ve always been frightened by what man can do, using war. It’s an underlying energy in my life, and my work allows an outlet for what I am afraid of. For instance, in Ambivalent Monarch (2026), she’s wearing a crown, and there is a reference to symbols of power: crowns, scepters, capes, all of those things.
Rail: Are there works in your show that address vulgarity and violence?
Buck: Shootout At Sunset. Women are asked to play roles in costumes that they’re put in for beauty pageants, or dress in of their own volition—wearing, you know, negligees on the street, and objectifying themselves—because they’ve been told that’s how they will gain respect or admiration from men, rather than say, “I don’t feel comfortable.” I have a pretty good understanding about how harsh reality is and can be, and about the dark side of humankind. I think you know that we are lucky that we’ve gotten this far, because the world has always been terrifying, and that’s why I’m fascinated by knights, kings, and queens and all: because it was terrifying. I mean, what a horrible time to be alive, and yet all those people found joy.
Rail: So I wanted to speak a little bit about your process. You described your process as being highly intuitive and a bit of a treasure hunt: that the way you start, you don’t quite know what you’re going to find.
Buck: I think that I’m trying to speak to, like, the everywoman, the everyman, the universals, and not all in one portrait, but in things that I’ve glimpsed about humankind, in looking at faces. I’m looking for who are you, who are we, and they’re all an amalgamation of all the faces I’ve studied all my life—on the street, the subway, the airplane, at parties. I want to discover a new person when I’m doing the portraits.
Rail: What have you glimpsed?
Buck: The fragility of human beings. The fear, humor, and laughter—the ability to break character. I love to see the façade fall, and I think that the portraits are all about hopes and fears, and the toll that life takes on a human, and how it’s etched on a face.
In The Farmer’s Daughter (2025), the painting started as a woman, and then I started thinking about farm women that wear these aprons. I put an apron on her, and I thought, “She’s the daughter of the farmer,” but as I painted, she just started looking more masculine, while wearing this apron, and she’s growing a beard, and finally I thought, “She’s not sure. I’m gonna let this character that I found while painting, just be.”
Rail: How do you make choices about color?
Buck: My sense of color has never changed and has been the same for forty years, and it is high-intensity. I’m always trying to get the most out of every color, and to yell—I want it loud. I’m not going to get anywhere being quiet, and that’s part of my personality, not whispering.
Rail: These are high-volume paintings! Today you have a foundation dedicated to supporting women in the arts with the Deborah Buck Foundation, which means you are a practicing artist engaged in philanthropy, making you a multifaceted individual. In addition to pursuing painting that addresses questions about women, how has engaging in the world through this philanthropic mission added to your practice as an artist?
Buck: It was very fulfilling to realize I had the guts to do this. At the end of the day, I can sleep because I will have made a difference in opening people’s eyes to what has not been allowed for women. These works are very controversial and sort of shocking in their own way, and yet if a man had made these paintings, they’d be considered raucous—sexy even. Today there are a lot of women making outrageous paintings. But we haven’t gone far enough, so my foundation will go on after I’m dead. When I take my final breath, I can feel proud about that.
Rail: Could you share more specifically how your foundation has made an impact?
Buck: I only support institutions. I think in order to really create change, you have to do it at the institutional level. So when an institution says work is important and needs to be seen, and it’s by a woman that hasn’t gotten her due—if the work is forceful, outrageous, strong, and brilliant, it needs to be shown, and I say, “Okay, let’s go!”
Rail: An artist who also has the capacity to be a philanthropist—it’s a special role to be in. You have to be brave. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney comes to mind: she founded of the Whitney Museum, and also had an active studio practice. More recently, Tony Bechara was a painter (currently being shown at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York) who was also on many boards and engaged in nonprofit arts philanthropy. J. Seward Johnson Jr. was a trompe l’oeil sculptor and founded the Grounds For Sculpture park in New Jersey. Through the Rebuild Foundation, Theaster Gates combines his practice as an artist with initiatives to create impact in South Chicago neighborhoods. There are more and more artists whose practice intertwines with philanthropic missions. Your foundation’s mission to support women in the arts, where there is an imbalance, has accompanied questions you’ve studied and put out there your whole career.
Buck: I can only hope to be included in that really lovely pantheon.