Hello and welcome to the 55th 3 Art Questions With Jackson interview! This time I interviewed the very talented painter and musician Daniel Buettner. I particularly liked his 2019 show at Rosalux Gallery and I have listened to his bands (Broken Hearts Are Blue and Skulpture) with my dad on Bandcamp. Really cool! Check them out! I really enjoyed his answers and I think you will too. Thank you for reading! (Instagram: @danbue / All images courtesy of the artist)
Jackson: What cause your interest in both art and music? Do you feel art and music are connected for you?
Daniel: Growing up, there were a few artists in my family and in the neighborhood I lived in, in Upstate New York. To be an artist was never a crazy idea to me. It was something I saw other people doing, and even though it wasn't something that was necessarily nurtured in my immediate family, my parents recognized it was something I drifted in and out throughout my childhood. It wasn't until high school that I started taking it seriously, which is when I think my parents started to encourage me to turn it into a career. High school is also when I started playing music. I hadn't given playing an instrument much thought before then, but somewhere around 16 or 17 years old I noticed many of my friends were taking music lessons and/or starting punk bands. I was heavily involved in skateboard culture, and the two seemed to go hand in hand. I wanted to be part of that. I don't know when the DIY ethic became mainstream, but it was very ingrained in everything we did. We built our own ramps, printed our own photographs, started our own zines, and made our own t-shirts for our skate team. When it came to playing music, it was the same - you bought an instrument and started a band. There was no concern with learning how to play first. For me, visual art and music are not connected at all. Painting has always represented pure individual expression to me. It's you vs yourself. You celebrate your wins and learn from your loses privately. Being in bands and writing music with people brings collaboration to my life. The value is in creating a piece of art with others, whose contribution you can't control. It's a much different experience.
Jackson: What inspires your ideas for painting and playing music? Do ideas just come to you or do you have to work at coming up with things?
Daniel: With painting, I have to work at getting my ideas. My art has always been about finding humor in the small moments in life, and those are not always easy to find. I get inspired by looking at photographs. People, animals, objects - all things. I sift through photographs in magazines and online constantly, looking for something to jump out at me that would make a good beginning concept for a painting. I use a lot of other people's work in my own; mostly their photographs, but sometimes even artworks other people make appear in my paintings. When I do that, I always reference the original artist in the title. I'm inspired by interesting poses, expressions, patterns, and of course shiny things. Songwriting is much more organic. Though I do write independently for a long-distance band I'm in, I prefer to write in real-time with other people, which is why I also play with some local musicians. Our songs usually start out with everyone just kind of making sounds and looking for interesting patterns in what we are doing. Either something will come together and be the beginning of a song, or it won't and we will move on. I think to make interesting music you have to subscribe to the philosophy that there will never be any shortage of creative material, and therefore no need to force yourself to fall in love with something that is "good enough". It's always obvious when one member of a band wrote a song and forced it on everyone else, if for no other reason than they spent time writing it. I don't slave over songs. If it doesn't come easy, it doesn't stay long. In order to write this way you have to be playing with the right people. Bandmates are like spouses; the best ones have opposite interests but similar goals.
Jackson: If you could meet and artist living or dead, who would it be and why?
Daniel: This is a tough one! There are so many artists I'd like to meet. Julie Mehretu would definitely be in my top five. Kehinde Wiley for sure, Duchamp, Rauschenberg...but I'm going with Ben Shahn. I absolutely love his work and have tried any times to pair colors like he does, and I feel like I fail every time. I want to know how he chose his palate and his process for layering paint. He used Tempera, which I also find fascinating. I think I would learn a lot from a conversation with Ben Shahn.
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