Tomio Koyama Gallery Tokyo - Kyoto | TKG Editions　Ginza - Kyoto

——— Why did you select the trees or the landscape as your main motif?

Butler I began using landscape imagery as a starting point for making abstract paintings in 2001. This was also the year of my first trip to Japan. Visiting picturesque scenery, in real life, that echoed what I was painting (such as the forests and mountains of Nikko, and the ocean and coast of Kamakura) definitely strengthened my interests. There was also a special request, that year, from one of my Grandmothers, to paint her a landscape when I had a chance. Besides wanting to fulfill this refreshing, and sincere, request, the idea appealed to me on a sort of folk art, popular art level. I knew that she had something like Bob Ross's paintings in mind. Bob Ross was an American television painting instructor, perhaps most famous for his mellow voice, big hair, and his paintings of "happy trees". Making modest, accessible, abstract, and potentially abject paintings felt like the right thing to do. This was probably inspired by having grown up in the Midwest, in Kansas. People living in America's Midwest seem to have almost an allergy to things which seem pretentious. Of course, every painter, at some point, or on many occasions, makes decisions about what to paint. There are so many choices, and yet, everything has been done before. I suppose landscapes and the trees appeal to me, most concretely, for a few reasons. First, they have a strong connection to the romantic history of painting. (Some of my favorite examples of trees as subject matter in painting come by way of Caspar David Friedrich, Hudson River School, Mondrian, and Charles Burchfield.) Second, the motif is very familiar to everyone, to the point of it being a cliche. As a contemporary painter in the year 2010, I'm constantly struggling with these polarities. Can paintings, inherently romantic, exist in a time where everything has been done before, a time where everything feels cliche? Lastly, the landscape reference also has a strong relationship to kitsch, mostly via thriftstore paintings, which I have collected and admire, maybe most of all for their awkward directness and sincerity.

——— Your works look more abstract recently. Could you tell us how your interest has changed?

Butler In these new paintings, I've begun depicting the tree forms with colored pencil drawn lines, rather than painted brushstrokes, in order to push the work in a more abstract direction. The tree-like forms are still there, but they have less physical presence. To answer your question, though, my interests, and the way I paint, haven't really changed at all. For me, the work has always been mostly about abstraction and painting as a subject matter. The landscapes and the trees have always operated more like ready-made compositions, or a place for abstraction to occur. I do think, though, that there are some parallels that can be drawn between the way people sentimentally react to nature, and artists' attachments to painting, modernism, and abstraction. Everyone knows that nature is disappearing at an ever-increasing rate. There is a nostalgia that exists for the way things used to be, and the way things used to look. This is very similar to past modes of artmaking. Abstract Expressionism might be the mountains, Color Field Painting (or better yet stripe painting), the trees, and Minimalism, the polar ice caps.

——— Why do you separate trees into such geometric parts?
Otherwise do these parts become the patterns, not trees any more?

Butler Definitely, a separation between the two is important. Maybe this is a good time to remind people that first, and foremost, I'm a painter...and definitely not an arborist. Sometimes I wonder how many trees I'd have to paint for people to realize that the paintings aren't really about trees at all. Maybe I'm asking too much, but the trees in the paintings are mostly meant to be looked past and through...considered, then ignored. This visual separation between the trees and the patterns of paint around them is some attempt to communicate these thoughts.

——— Could you tell us about the difference of your brush strokes? Some parts look light, some are mat.

Butler I do use a variety of painterly techniques. For instance, in the largest painting in the exhibition, "Untitled (Blue, Green, Brown)" *1 , I was basically thinking about each area as it's own painting. Some areas are more expressive than others through the process of adding more paint, and others through the process of adding less, by way of drybrush. The mat areas also behave very formally, sometimes inviting the viewer in and at other times pushing the viewer away.

——— About the detail; in some works, there is a line or blank space like a horizon. Do they represent the horizon?

Butler I think you mean the areas of blank, white canvas. In the smaller motif paintings and also the large painting, "Dark Tree (Blue, Green, Brown)" *2 , these areas do dictate the horizon, or the ground, meaning the foundation from which the "tree" grows out of. However, there is also a double meaning. It also plays the role of painter's ground, meaning the gesso primed canvas which the artist paints upon. In other paintings, the blank areas operate similarly, but not as literally or metaphorically.

——— The work named Autumn 2010 looks different from the others, you filled the picture with just orange color.

Butler The painting, "Autumn 2010" *3 , developed in kind of a strange way. Before the canvas was stretched I was looking at the stretcher bars and it reminded me of some stripe paintings I made, around six years ago, which very loosely depicted forests. The vertical stretcher bars, on a horizontal plane, represented a very stripped down version of these paintings for me. Seasons are a recurring theme, in my work, which I use, partially, as a metaphor for the cyclical process of painting, and, more simply, as a way to retain a connection to landscape painting. What resulted, influenced by the stretcher bars' positions, was this very artificially colored, minimal, yet painterly, orange painting (a little reminiscent of a Barnett Newman zip painting). Because of the intense, artificial color, I knew that some people would think this painting did not look at all like Autumn or Fall colors. Keeping this in mind, I thought it might be interesting (or funny) to turn the painting into a premonition of what Autumn in the year 2010 might look like.

——— There are both titled works like "Dark Tree(Blue,Green,Brown)" and Untitled.
How do you separate the titled works and the untitled ones?

Butler Titles can really set the tone of an exhibition. Since I wanted "Paintings and Drawings 2010" to have more of a traditional abstract painting show feel to it, I first began titling the drawings and smaller paintings using the title of Untitled, which was commonly used by mid-century abstract painters. However, I did give the 4 larger paintings titles more inline with past works. My early paintings had rather poetic titles, such as "Sway", or "Orange Stripes, Morning Light", which evolved into mundane titles that appeared poetic due to their landscape/seasonal adjectives. Mostly I've tried to title my paintings in a very straight-forward way, using color and maybe numbers of natural objects as guides. Maybe the most extreme example of this, is a painting from 2006, "Fifty-Five Trees at Sunset", which literally has 55 trees in it.

——— You're showing drawings for the first time at the gallery. Are they studies for the paintings? Otherwise, do they have their own meanings?

Butler The drawings and paintings in this exhibition, while definitely in conversation with each other, and influenced by one another, are not studies. They are each unique works. This exhibition first began, specifically, as a drawing show. This was a very self-reflective phase for me. I was away from my New York studio, making work in unusual settings. It lead to some new painting ideas that I couldn't resist trying out. After making drawings and watercolors in Kamakura, I started painting small-scale, in oil on canvas, in Kamakura. Drawing literally made its way onto the canvas. I continued with works on paper in Nikko, then I moved to a studio space in Tokyo, in order to make the larger works.

——— After this exhibition, do you have any new trial which you would like to do?

Butler I always need time, during and after a show, to reflect, and reassess things. I have to find some new way back into the work. This time spent in Japan, has been really special. It's hard to say, right now, in what ways it might change my perspective. I won't really know until I finally get back to work in my Brooklyn studio. I'm definitely feeling re-energized and excited, though, about what might be around the next corner.