Jim Butler

Jim Butler

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