Jim Butler
American, born 1956
American, born 1956
Yale Summer School of Painting and Music, Norfolk, Connecticut
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, Maine
B.F.A. Rhode Island School of Design
M.F.A. Indiana University
Assistant Professor of Art, Middlebury, 1981
Associate Professor of Art, 1989
Professor of Art, 1994–present
Curator
Recent American Pastels
Christian A. Johnson Memorial Gallery, 1988
Selected Collections
Middlebury College Museum of Art
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden
Jim Butler has always been interested in aspects of unreal or hyper-real experience that he perceives in the ostensibly real world. To that end he has painted dreamy visions that, while credible, border on nightmare. And he collects offbeat, discarded objects that are variously humorous, unbelievably ugly, or simply weird. His painting has always rendered these objects painstakingly and accurately, as if they were icons worthy of worshipful attention. It is that quality of straightforward, sustained contemplation that his paintings convey, regardless of their strangely ineffable subject matter.
-Emmie Donadio 2000
Person TypeIndividual
Terms
American, born Russia (now Ukraine), 1899 – 1988
