Welcome.
I make art because I value connection. In a world connecting differently every day, making that connection is vital to who we are as people.
My preferred medium is paint – house paint, tempera paint, paint crayons, pastels – and I love using the juxtaposition of color and the layering of words, letters, and images as visual elements. I am always surprised when anyone likes it. At all.
All creative endeavors communicate a story, whether poetry, literature, film, or music. Yet art has the power to convey the story in a rapid, visceral way not found in other disciplines. I am a storyteller at heart, and the beauty of art is that the story is different for every person who encounters it, and different for an individual at varying times in their life.
My favorite tool may surprise some: tape. When I work with tape I am reminded that we all compartmentalize experience. I like to break up a two-dimensional canvas or flat space into panes, like a window. We all bring a unique perspective to the world, and I like to see what things look like through these different panes.
You will discover several patterns in my work. I paint targets on everything, starting with my books from school through doodles in work place meetings through every piece of artwork since 1990. I use three in every work – sometimes you can see them and sometimes you cannot, they end up layered under paint. Targets for me are sometimes goals, sometimes imposed whipping spots from others, sometimes they are tumors, sometimes happy and productive.
The use of three of something in every work is another pattern. It began with wings and butterflies and is now targets and colors. It is said that everything in the universe touches everything else in three places at a molecular level. In using threes I am doing my own small part to support the universe; it feels comfortable and balanced to me.
Though I express myself more fully through art than words, I love words in their most elemental forms. Type and text are another pattern that shows up in my work. Letters, fonts, and the way letters are shaped all speak to me, and I believe to others, in a way that goes beyond the words and sentences they can form.
When people see my work, I want them to feel something, a connection to a graphic element or a color. I want people to not feel like they have to understand what I intended the work to mean – just to like it for some quality about it that makes them feel that connection.
I feel a piece has turned out well when it looks balanced and close to what I intended. A piece can never truly be done, though. It breathes and grows and changes with each person who experiences it. In that sense, every piece of art has a soul.
Indi Butler
Fort Worth, TX
October 2014