About Buff

Buff Hungerland is a writer and visual artist whose experience includes arts production, arts instruction, publicity, and academic leadership. A former long-time instructor for The Art Institute of Seattle in design and academic director for General Education, Hungerland is the author of Marketing Your Creative Portfolio: Making the Leap form Creating a Portfolio to Getting a Job as  Professional Creative (Prentice Hall, 2002). 

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As a professional crafts maker in metals, clay and fiber, Hungerland’s work has been carried in 150 galleries and stores nationally and internationally, travelled in juried shows, and held in private collections.  Current visual work includes tiny watercolor studies. 

Current literary projects include a travel memoir, tentatively titled Postcards from Oz: An Outsider’s Insider-View of Australia. Buff Hungerland holds an MA from Antioch-Seattle in Adult and Higher Education (Multiculturalism in Design Education), a K-12 teaching certificate in art from University of Northern Colorado, and a BA from University of California Riverside in Art History.

Current volunteer work includes visual and graphic projects for Field’s End, a writers’ community (www.fieldsend.org) and the Bainbridge Island Housing Resources Board (www.housingresourcesboard.org.

Hungerland makes her home on an island in the Puget Sound in Washington state with her childhood sweetheart, two aging sweet/smart dogs and a borrowed cat, and for a quarter of the year, near the eastern-most point of Australia, Byron Bay, New South Wales. 

From Buff:

Edges. 

I like to explore the edges of things, and push one edge up against another to see what happens, to expose or even create something new.  I like the deckled edge of handmade paper and the torn edge of fabric.  I like the way pigment accumulates at the edge of a watercolor line.  And  I like to add bits and pieces to enhance the juiciness of the newly exposed in all my creative work.  

Layers.  

What I try to do in my writing, is explore those delicious edges or juxtapose the subtle unexpected layers where cultures under- and overlap — so similar on the surface, and so different underneath.  It’s there that I find an opportunity to explore culture and language and the odd and wonderful circumstances of human life.  If I amuse myself or think about things from a different perspective, or even figure something out, then my creative impulse has been satisfied.  If others get a chuckle or even say “hunh,”  then I’m pleased to have shared my work.

Place.  

Why Oz, the Australia we’ve come to love?  I first came to Australia more than a decade ago to visit our daughter, an exchange student at LaTrobe University in Melbourne.  She married, became a young mother, then a single mother who could not leave Australia with her daughter.  

So, I flew to Oz for a mother’s hug once a year for my two week vacation from teaching at a post-secondary school of design, and then twice a year for two weeks, and then for as long as I could finagle twice a year.  

Somehow, somewhere along the way, Australia and its very generous people got their hooks into me.  I can’t explain nor pinpoint when that happened, but it did.  I remain a fascinated observer and an enthusiastic participant whenever I can fly south, for as long as I can stay.  

Come along with me to Oz.

     

 

Contact/comments:  b.hungerland@gmail.com