PAUL BUTLER: the space of forgetting

Stuff

Well, after a little interval - about a year - with some technical assistance, I have revived my blog.

CV

Download Paul_butler cv

1,000 drawings

These are a random sample of the drawings that have accumulated in my plans chest over the years and now number, at a rough guess, over a thousand. I look through some of them routinely and cross-reference more recent ideas and images with older ones, but I rarely dig down deep through the layers. 

Now I'm older I look at them again and whereas before I saw them merely as a currency - a source, marker, reference, or a record - now I recognise them as small autonomous pieces of work.   

 

 

stuff

Biography

Paul Butler

Paul Butler is a painter who has shown widely nationally and internationally. Exhibitions include Narrative Painting, Arnolfini gallery Bristol, Nuremberg International Drawing Triennale, The John Moores Liverpool biennale, East International and an Arts Council sponsored retrospective at the Ikon gallery Birmingham. From 1996 until 2001 he was represented by the Robert Sandleson gallery, Cork Street London. His work is included in many public collections including the Arts Council, the Museum of London and the Jerwood foundation as well as those of private collectors such as Peter Ackroyd, Beryl Bainbridge and Ralph Fiennes.

 From !989 until 2009 he was head of Painting and subsequently Professor of Fine Art at The University for the Creative Arts Farnham and from !985 until 2006 he was director of the Small Mansion Arts Centre, London.

Throughout his career Paul Butler has also undertaken many public projects and residencies including the Cable Street mural (with Ray Walker and Desmond Rochfort) in !982/3, the Shepherds Bush Peace mural in 1984, and the TUC Labour History mural in 1989. He has been artist-in-residence in the London borough of Hounslow and Maltby colliery in Yorkshire.

Awards and bursaries include an Arts Council major award in 1980, a Rootstein Hopkins bursary to research in the United States in 1999, and in 2009 he was a Rothko painter-in-residence in Daugavpils in Latvia (Rothko’s birthplace).

 In 2011 he restored the Brixton Peace mural on Brixton Academy, and the same year the Cable Street mural. In 2014 he will commence the restoration of the Dalston Peace mural. In 2011/12 he worked with students from the Bethnal Green Technology College to create a 10metre banner and subsequently a float for the Lord Mayors show in London.

 Paul Butler continues to paint and draw and is proud of his record of showing in mixed and solo shows every year since his first one-man exhibition in 1976.