David Butler’s career as an artist commenced in his late forties when his career in a sawmill came to an abrupt end following an injury. He insists that he had drawn and carved most of his life, depicting the scenes and animals he saw around him.
He began to cut shapes from tin sheet using a hammer and chisel, then painted them with enamel and house paint and placed them around his house. While not entirely abandoning familiar scenes, over time Butler came to rely more and more on dreams and fantasy and introduced such images as sea monsters and lizards to his complicated windmill and whirligig assemblages. One of his favorite motifs is a four-pointed star that has antecedents in Haitian and African Art. By covering the windows of his house with tin sheets perforated with precise patterns, Butler protected the interior from the intense Louisiana sunlight while at the same time creating complex patterns of light and shadow inside.
Butler elaborately surrounded himself by a world of personal creations that reflected his very personal world and protected him from the outside. After his work was shown in the Corcoran Gallery’s 1982 "Black Folk Art in America" exhibition, would-be buyers of his art frequently visited his remarkable shotgun shack outside of Patterson, LA. Unfortunately, it was dismantled in the mid-1980’s after an illness forced him to move in with his sister in 1983.
Butler was never at ease away from this environment of his artwork. Even his short travels in the area were made on a bicycle he decorated and painted. When the New Orleans Museum of Art mounted an exhibition of his work in 1976, the Good Hope Baptist Church raised money to take the entire congregation to the opening. Butler, characteristically, declined to go along. Now confined to a nursing home, he has done little work since leaving his home. |
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