"I want to be the man from nowhere," he told his biographer.
R. Butters was born in the USA in 1944, went to art school in the San Francisco Bay Area in the sixties, and since that time has worked as an outsider artist. By the age of four he had gotten into trouble for reworking the new floral wallpaper with human features at adult eye level, inventing anamorphic* art for himself. Another early impulse was to copy some of Doré's horrific illustrations in the family Bible over the text with crayon. Shock and punishment were an early source of power unleashed by a crayon. Impulses to draw cause a duality of reward or consequences.Butters' artistic influences include the 19th century Symbolists, the early Surrealists, the Viennese school of Fantastic Realism and, generally speaking, the art of the insane. As a 'pataphysician, his approach with multi-stable art is to enter between the mind and the eye in order to directly affect the mechanics of perception. His paintings have a hallucinatory quality intended to shock the viewer's senses. He has always been fascinated by art which is tied to experiments in visual perception, like those found in the works of Dali and Escher. He feels that a painting should deliver a jolt, portraying the connection between poetry and imagery visible on different planes simultaneously. Causing the mind to expand beyond the limit of the visual senses forces one to access and stimulate other areas of the brain. Now he is unwrapping these original paintings, which have been stored in drawers for years, making this work available in a limited edition to collectors by the digital technology of the Giclée printing process. Giclée printing produces faithful, archival museum quality prints. Presently R. Butters lives on the Californian coast. "I'm finishing a lifelong project to illustrate Jarry's Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, but unlike Jarry I will publish before I have savored the beauty for myself." As told to Dr. Albion Moonlight Butters. *Anamorphic Art - From the Greek 'ana' (again), 'morphe' (shape) - indicates that the spectator plays a part in mentally re-forming the picture. |