Buckle describes this part of his life as “…the point when I realised life’s possibilities, it is truly possible to shape your life into anything that you choose…and re-shape.” Later that year he briefly returned to the UK to buy “Bertha” an old British Army truck which he quickly converted into a mobile home before returning to the continent. He sustained this lifestyle through pavement art, replicating Caravaggio’s and Renoirs and other old masters in pastel and also occasional commercial painting, including murals in the towns and cities he visited.
Over the next 5 years Buckle continued to travel. He spent a year in Asia and Australia and continued to travel around Europe in Bertha. In 1997 he drew a close to his itinerant lifestyle and co-founded the sand sculpture company ‘Sandaholics Anonymous’ in Amsterdam. Sandaholics were responsible for sculptures and sculpture events around the world, from Abu Dhabi to Texas. Buckle and Sandaholics found much success; including two 3rd place finishes at the World Championships in Canada and in ‘selling sand to the Arabs’, when they created the largest sand sculpture ever built in the Middle East.
Describing sand sculpture as “…too much Mickey Mouse and not enough Salvador Dali” Buckle grew tired of the commercialism of the genre and, after a brief venture with the Iraqi Football Association breaking pre-war trade sanctions by remanufacturing and selling the official replica strip of the Iraqi national team as a fund raising and publicity campaign against the planned invasion, he quit Sandaholics in 2002. He sold his 50% share of the business to finance his study at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam from where he graduated in Fine Art in 2007.
On graduation, Buckle was immediately offered the post of assistant to New York based Artist Joshua Neustein, and so he headed across the Atlantic again. This developed into a fraught several months and culminated in his premature return to Amsterdam in December 2007.
Currently based in both Amsterdam and London he continues to work on new projects and exhibitions and is also one of the key members of 'Flat World Thinking' a freelance creative think-tank specialised in corporate inovation and marketplace expansion.
