Sunny Buick

Extract of the Sunny Buick Manifesto:

“What’s inside a girl? Sugar, spice and everything nice, of course. On the outside she’s a candy-coated illusion of sweetness. Inwardly she’s famished for all that’s out of reach, forced a diet of self-loathing in search for perfection, a sweet confection feeding on herself, recycling her identity from what she culls from the outside. Corrosive like sugar to the teeth. She seeks her sanctuary inwardly and cannibalizes it. Hungry because she shouldn’t take too much. Taking too much because she’s so hungry.

I’m a girl; it’s obvious by looking at my work. I think I know a little about beauty, a great deal of my life has been spent pondering it’s mystery; devouring fashion magazines, sentenced to perpetual diets, reaching for an impossible ideal that has marked me since birth. I’ve lived by the mirror; obsessed by the magic of makeup, fashion, and art, to the point of being traumatized by it. I’ve faithfully studied the feminine mystique, and how to conjure an illusion to pacify this ruthless ideal that has haunted women through the ages.

But there is more lurking just below the surface. My drawings, my paintings can appear a little naïve on the surface. I’m still that only child who found a little reassurance in a world of her own fantasies, but somewhere deeper there’s my feminine intuition. My paintings hold the keys to all my beliefs, judgements and confused thoughts, which eventually work themselves out, intuitively, like the subconscious work of dreams. The images often take time to reveal their significance, in ways I can’t articulate or I don’t dare to say—making art to express how I feel about the world, my life, my experiences, wanting to create another universe even if it’s just a fantasy. Some of that fantasy is based on an obsession for the past, and by creating an imaginary past, I can restore a sense of belonging; recycling images to give signposts to the future because we are so lost today. Rejecting motherhood for another kind of creation; my paintings are my babies, is that immaturity and irresponsibility? I carelessly shut the door to the rest of the world to dream. Lost in the confusion, modern women have no role models. Morbidly intriguing, we create outward illusions guarding internal mysteries even from ourselves. Trapped between Narcissism and dependency, a target of consumerism, girls are forever in a state of suspension. How desperate then the quest for this girlish imagery to resolve the trauma, finding therapeutic feelings of safety in something hauntingly familiar.”