Megan Buccere

Perspectives : Megan Buccere

In surreal narrative paintings, the painter explores Louisiana flora and folklore

By Alexandra Kennon

Since she was a little girl, Zachary-based artist Megan Buccere has been intrigued by darkness. “I have a little weird side, I like darker things. Like, Halloween is my favorite time of year, since I was tiny.” So, the Tennessee native has always a particular connection to her adopted home of Louisiana, a place that so poignantly balances its natural beauty with the intrigue of lore and mystery.

“In Louisiana, there’s sort of this undercurrent of mysticism…and I always just found that fascinating,” Buccere explained. “I’ve loved New Orleans since before we even moved to Louisiana. And when we moved here, I was sort of like, ‘Oh, this is where I need to be. This is it.’”

Looking through her portfolio, it’s evident that both the wildlife and landscapes of the Bayou State, as well as its its darker undercurrents, have worked their way into Buccere’s psyche, and in turn into her art. There’s a signature style to her work, which she explains has been a journey to develop.

Though Buccere had started painting in kindergarten and spent most of her youth in art classes, she had mostly put down the paintbrush by the time she started at Parkview Baptist High School. It was only at the encouragement of an inspiring teacher, Donna Soniat, that she returned to the canvas. “She was just this sort of spark that I needed to get back into it, and that's what I did,” Buccere said. At the time, she explained, her artistic style was much more in the vein of of pop art, with bold colors and strong lines.

Buccere also credited Soniat’s influence with her decision to become an arts educator herself. “She sort of is the reason why I wanted to become an art teacher,” she said. After studying art education at LSU (a major that no longer exists there), Buccere began teaching at Zachary High School in 2000, and has been there ever since—overseeing everything from talented art to ceramics, in addition to being the visual and performing arts department head.

On her own time, Buccere has managed to build and maintain her own studio art practice—creating everything from oil and acrylic paintings, to sculptural ceramic works like ornate frames, to a deck of tarot cards featuring her original gouache paintings on black illustration board—all from the Zachary home she shares with her husband, a math teacher at Zachary High, their son who just started his freshman year there, and more recently, Buccere’s mother.

At one point she would have described her work as an outlet through which to explore the inner turmoils that comes with anxiety and depression.

In one of her earlier portraits, a rockabilly-styled pinup girl poses suggestively, her fingers entangled in thread from a ball of string floating just behind her. Beetles crawling on her chest weave the thread around pushpins stuck into her skin. “And a lot of that had to do with anxiety and you know, the strings that I used in those paintings that suggest a sort of tangled up feeling.” But in more recent years, she is discovering a shift in inspiration. “I think my work is sort of moving away from that, that sort of tangled mess of a feeling,” she said.

Instead, Buccerre’s paintings now depict more narrative images, drawing from the folklore and flora that made her first fall in love with Louisiana. Many of her paintings, particularly those hanging at Ann Connelly Fine Art Gallery in Baton Rouge, depict Louisiana native birds like spoonbills or cranes juxtaposed with symbols such as gemstones or birdcages; vibrant colors contrasting starkly with jet black or swampy silhouetted backgrounds. Her art has also garnered an audience beyond Louisiana, having been shown in galleries in New York, San Francisco, Colorado, and the Pacific Northwest.

In recent works, birds, bats, and butterflies take on a strange, mythic reverence—a sort of swampland clergy overseeing a ritual. In a painting titled “A Prayer of Flight” a bat clutching a glowing blue gemstone in its curling tongue hangs upside-down over Venus flytraps, their prickly plant mouths agape, accented by a crescent moon. In another, a white heron and a spoonbill attentively flank a glowing green gem floating above a Venus flytrap as butterflies swarm and another pair of birds look on.

Buccere cites John William Waterhouse as a particular influence on her portraiture, which balances the grace of female beauty with themes darker in tone—the women she paints are often bound to Louisiana’s swamps, and reaching or yearning for something beyond. “There’s something they're trying to find; there's something there they're trying to chase or catch a sense of in those in those images.”

It feels appropriate that Buccere created a deck of tarot cards—her 2018 Obsidian Oracle Deck, with an expanded “Black Edition” released in 2021—since she says the images in her artwork appear in her head before she paints them into reality, almost like premonitions.

“It's a really strange place in my head sometimes,” she told me with a wry laugh. “Sometimes I just see an image, sometimes I see a composition. And I'm really compositionally focused when it comes to my work. I'm almost more concerned about the strength of the composition than anything else.”

Since oracle decks need not adhere to any classic tarot deck format or include any particular cards, the project granted Buccere the creative freedom to paint cards reflecting the very specific images that appeared in her head. While painting tiny renderings of birds and different subjects in gouache on black illustration board, it occurred to her that the small compositions would make quite a striking tarot deck. “So, I started researching animals and bugs and different things like that, and what their meanings were, what their totems were.”

And, of course, tarot falls right into the realm of spiritualism that has long captivated Buccere’s imagination. “Again, it goes back to that sort of mysticism, back to the Victorian times, when they were super obsessed with the spirit world,” she mused. “And they’ve come back in popularity lately.”

As fall descends, and Buccere’s favorite holiday approaches, the artist is once again embracing the darkness as inspiration, perhaps even a bit more than usual. “Like, right now I'm drawing things that are a little darker,” she told me. “Because you know, it's fall, and I’m getting in a certain mood.”

Buccere’s work is currently on display at Ann Connelly Fine Art in Baton Rouge, and can be found on her website, Etsy, and Instagram via meganbuccere.com.