Sharon Butler

Sharon Butler is an artist, writer, editor, and publisher of the art blog Two Coats of Paint. In 2011 she composed an essay for The Brooklyn Rail in which she coined the term New Casualism, an approach that defined a new aesthetic and style of working. Butler did not invent Casualism so much as she noticed it in her own work as well as the work of other artists. It is characterized by the sense of a work being incomplete, unrefined, and unresolved in contrast with the traditional criteria of Western classicism. In the intervening years, Casualism has come to represent more of a tendency than a convention-defying trend, an inclination rather than a swagger. It values process over product, eschewing any formula or mannerism that may render a work suitable for the art market. For Butler, Casualism is a sensibility that extends beyond paint and canvas; hers is an open-ended process that favors the unexpected and unintentional. Beauty is incidental and subjective, interesting only insofar as it generates an emotional response. In her current work, Butler explores the relationship between the emotions and the intellect, searching for the sweet spot where both may be activated simultaneously. But the intentionality behind this inquiry may preclude the desired outcome, as, according to Butler, the emotions are most readily accessed through the accidental marks that suffuse her paintings. Indeed, it is the unintentional smudges, drips, and pentimenti that expose our humanity, not the calculated curves and angles of geometric abstraction. Humans make mistakes, create chaos, and are beset by blurry indecision, all of which contribute to an emotionally charged painting. But that’s only half the equation for Butler, who invites the intellect, with its surgical specificity, to interact and collaborate with our erratic emotions.

MH: How and when did you come to be an artist? Did your parents push you towards the artist’s path?
SB: I wasn’t pushed towards an artist’s path, but my parents were lovers of Modernism. They built a modern house in Stonington, Connecticut where I grew up, and the house and environment had a great influence on me. When we moved into the house there were lots of empty white walls, so my father painted replicas of his favorite abstract paintings. There were Mondrians, Picassos, and Klees, and I didn’t realize until later that these weren’t his original paintings. My mother lived in New York before they were married, and she took us on frequent trips to New York to visit the museums. So being surrounded by Modernist architecture and abstract art, and then having exposure to great art museums really informed my interest in art.
MH: You went to college in Boston and eventually found your way to New York. Did living in the city immediately have an impact on your work, or did it take a while to sink in?
SB: I just continued along the path that I was on. I was working abstractly at the time, painting big pieces of plywood, cutting them down with a jigsaw, and making these small constructions. At some point I took a studio in DUMBO, where all my power tools were stolen, and this had a big impact on the type of work I was making. It was a huge period of transition and I felt like New York got the better of me, so I ended up going to grad school in Connecticut where I got my MFA, then I moved back to New York. It was the two years in grad school that changed my work, more so than living in New York.
MH: In addition to being a painter, you’re also known for founding the art blog Two Coats of Paint and for writing an article in the Brooklyn Rail (2011) in which you coined the term New Casualism. This may be defined as an approach to painting that is intentionally dissonant, unpredictable, unfinished. 2011 was a long time ago, and I wondered if you still adhere to a Casualist sensibility in your work?
SB: I think of Casualism as a tendency rather than a movement, and there are several things that influenced my Casualist approach. One of them is that I moved a lot between places. I didn’t have a permanent studio, so I started using acrylics and unstretched canvases, and I’d fold them up when I had to move. This lifestyle began to affect my aesthetic. I started to like the way the folds looked on the canvas, and I became less interested in completion and resolution. When I looked around, I saw that other artists seemed to be working in the same way, and I began questioning this notion that paintings must be resolved. What if a painting wasn’t resolved? What would that mean? So I started looking at work that didn’t adhere to the Bauhaus principles of design and color, and this was the work that excited me. I wanted to write something about it, and the only reason I called it Casualism is that I needed to name it something so that I didn’t have to keep describing the work. It was just an easy way to discuss the tendencies that I was seeing.
MH: So if I understand you correctly, Casualism is a sensibility that continues to be present in your work; it’s basically who you are as an artist.
SB: It is. If someone tells me that no one likes green paintings, then I’m going to make green paintings. It’s kind of a contrary way of approaching the project.
MH: Do you find it ironic that Casualism, with its insistence on anti-formalism and rejection of traditional art school training and pedagogy, is now required reading in art school?
SB: I’m glad that it’s required reading in art school, because it’s simply a different way of looking at things and a different way of thinking about all those Bauhaus principles. If you do things in a way that you’re not supposed to do them, that’s how you’re going to come to something new.
MH: You have a lot of art instruction and you paint well, so your Casualism is going to be different than someone who doesn’t have that background. Is classical training essential before the artist can embrace a Casualist sensibility?
SB: I don’t think so. I appreciate things related to mark making and process that aren’t necessarily valued by other people. I was once a juror for a competition for high school students, which consisted of a bunch of carefully rendered drawings from magazines and films. The piece I chose for first place was a drawing that was crudely drawn, but the marks were very emotional and moving. The students were very upset.
MH: To create art without regard for formal concerns, the artist must possess a heroic amount of self-confidence. Without conventional standards by which one can gauge the results of their work – indeed, with notions of good and bad art taken out of the equation – the artist is called upon to trust in her own aesthetic choices. Is supreme self-confidence part of your DNA?
SB: (Laughing) No, I don’t think I have supreme self-confidence. Doubt is a big part of my work, and I like to see doubt in other artists’ work. My grounding in art history has been very important, because it allows me to think of my work as an extension of something from an earlier time. This knowledge of art history differentiates trained artists from untrained artists. I can slash a canvas, but I know that other people have done it before me, so I’m responding to, and having a conversation with, those earlier artists. Whereas an untrained artist might slash the canvas and think they’re the first person to do so.
MH: Ralph Waldo Emerson, who may have been the first Casualist, wrote a brilliant essay on Self-Reliance, in which he famously speaks of the need to “Trust thyself.” Is radical self-trust a requirement for the artist’s journey? Without it are we more apt to fall into the trap of imitation and assimilation?
SB: I think the key to being a successful artist is developing self-trust. And it’s not like you either have it or you don’t; it happens over time. It’s about having a commitment to your vision, whatever that is, even if you’re committing to the idea that you’re going to do many different things. It’s a commitment to your ideas and to the artist’s path and to knowing that other people have walked the path.
MH: One of the questions that I like to ask artists is how they know when a piece is finished. The answers are always a variation of, “When everything is resolved and working together as a whole.” But in a Casualist painting, where incompletion and imbalance are de rigueur, the response is more nuanced. So I ask you: how do you know when a piece is finished?
SB: I don’t like a piece that looks overdetermined. I like there to be a sense of openness, of the unintentional. I try to avoid that point where the shapes are too obvious, when the sense of space is too specific.
MH: What happens when you’ve gone too far? Can you dial it back?
SB: Yeah, that’s when I get out the paint roller. I make a mess of it again, then I try to bring it back to the point where it’s almost there, but not quite. And that’s when I like to stop. If you go just a little bit further it might be even better, but sometimes you just have to trust and stop where you are.
MH: Does Casualism redefine beauty, or is beauty considered irrelevant, anathema?
SB: I have a complex relationship with beauty. It’s a relationship with beauty, desire, and the audience. How much do I care if someone else finds my work desirable? Do I want them to appreciate it from an intellectual standpoint? Do I want them to swoon over it? I think beauty is hugely important in how the audience responds to your work, and I’m not talking about the New York art world, but about the world at large. Beauty is the thing that can draw people in, no matter how little they know about art. We all find beauty in different things, and there are people who find it in the unfinished, the less skilled.
MH: Given that it’s so complex and personal, maybe beauty isn’t the goal. Is there another benchmark that you use to assess your painting’s quality or value?
SB: I don’t like to write about my own work, because I don’t want to understand the mystery. If I understand what I’m doing, then I can’t do it, because it requires a sense of unknowing.
MH: One of the things that I admire about your work is that it’s continually evolving. You don’t get stuck in a style or mannerism but continue to explore and expand your medium. Do you place higher value on your process than the finished work, or are they of a piece?
SB: I love the process of figuring out where I’m going. I can’t make ten of the same thing, so there’s always going to be the sense of a timeline in my work, of how I got from here to here to here. Often when I have a show, I’ll stop moving forward and explore one idea until I finish the work for the show. That’s my way of creating a series that seems cohesive, because my work in general has that sense of forward motion.
MH: In that situation, and in all your work, it would seem that the process is paramount, and the finished work is an outcome of your exploration.
SB: Yes. I’m not very product oriented, and I’ve always been insulated from the market. For many years I was a professor at a university, so I never had to support myself through selling paintings. It’s given me the freedom not to care. Back in the day, collectors were interested in the intellectual and emotional process of making the work, but now the collectors seem to be more interested in the product. This makes it harder for artists who are more attuned to process and ideas.
MH: As a writer and thinker, you spend a lot of time in your head, and your studio work has a decidedly intellectual bent. But your paintings are also emotional, and I’m curious how the two come together as you smear paint around the canvas for hours at a stretch.
SB: Now we’re getting to the main focus of my endeavor for all these years. The relationship between thought and feeling, going from the sliding scale of digital diagrams to the murky area of paint on canvas. How can you take a diagram or outline and infuse it with emotional content? Or how can you take a gestural painting and infuse it with intellectual content? Paintings need to have both, and my practice has been about exploring that relationship. Like cooking, more of this, less of that, tinkering with the ingredients. Right now I’m particularly interested in the emotional aspect of painting, whereas for many years when I was making digital diagrams on my phone app, I would start with an idea or shape and find a way to infuse some emotional content.
MH: Your work is not formulaic; indeed it may be described as anti-formulaic. So to create emotional paintings, the best you can do is to show up in the studio and be present. I think we all hope to show up in that way, but it can be exhausting to be your raw, emotional self for hours at a stretch.
SB: Yes, I think that’s right. But I’m a flinty New Englander. I grew up not thinking about emotions one way or another. My sisters and I learned to be emotionally resilient, to just get on with it. So this idea about the relationship of emotion, thought, and action and all of that behavioral analysis is fascinating, but it plays to my strength of analyzing. I’m not an emotional live wire; it takes thought for me to access it.
MH: It’s interesting that a person who doesn’t have immediate access to her emotions is aspiring to create emotionally charged paintings. You really do like a challenge.
SB: Yes, and my question is, what does it mean to create an emotional painting? I look for artists who are interested in finding that sweet spot, where they can work in geometric abstraction, but find humanity in it as well.
MH: Color resonance can summon a lot of emotion. A Renaissance painting of the Crucifixion is moving to us today because of its color structure, not the subject matter.
SB: I recently saw the Orphism show at the Guggenheim, and what I loved about the work was that it was experimental; it had been made before they mastered their ideas. It’s interesting that the Orphists were thinking about what it meant to remove the image from painting. Does that remove the humanity? And how can we bring it back through color?
MH: You speak of an emotionalist tendency within geometric abstraction, and I know there are many art historical references to be made, from Albers to Malevich to Agnes Martin. How does emotion present itself in your paintings, geometric or otherwise?
SB: I think it’s the unfinished, the blurry, the drippy, the indecisive, the doubt. That’s where it is. And the color, as we’ve been talking about. These are the elements that I consider to be the least intentional and therefore they carry the emotional content.
MH: Interesting. Does intentionality undermines the emotions?
SB: Yes, I’d say that’s true in my work. There’s something about certainty and specificity that requires an analytical approach, and that requires more forethought.
MH: Are the analytical and emotional mutually exclusive in painting?
SB: It’s always on a scale. I love the accident of painting one color over another, the lack of intentionality when the paint blurs. There’s something that’s unavoidable in the accidents that I find very moving and emotional. I’ve always thought that there’s nothing more heartbreaking than a badly drawn line.
MH: I find it intriguing that the accidental passages are those which carry the most emotion for you.
SB: Yes, and I always appreciate being surprised by that. Sometimes when the work looks too intentional, I have to go back and start again, trying to find those accidents.
MH: And in that process there are analytical decisions, such as, This looks too intentional, so you have to go back and make it unintentional.
SB: But then you’re intentionally being unintentional. There has to be an authenticity in the accident.
MH: You sound like an artist who doesn’t do many thumbnail sketches.
SB: I actually do a lot of them. When I was doing the digital drawings on my phone, I did thumbnail sketches before I started painting. I have to get to know the shapes and the spaces between them before I can begin painting.
MH: Art reflects the time and culture in which the artist lives. This is generally seen in the rear-view mirror, but do you have any insights or inklings of how the work being produced today is, or will be, representative of early 21st century art?
SB: I’m not very optimistic that in 100 years anyone will be thinking about the paintings we’re making today. We have so many challenges ahead; are they really going to be worried about art history? Will the wealthy collectors be shipping their collections off to Mars? I don’t know. I’m just not hopeful that with climate change, anything’s going to survive. Look at what’s happening in L.A. Raging wildfires are consuming entire collections. Artists are losing bodies of work produced over their lifetimes. I think we probably got the best of it, Meg. We had a lot of freedom, women’s rights and more, which the new administration will be in the process of clawing back from day one.
MH: You’re about to set sail on a new journey. What inspired your trip to Ireland, and more importantly, giving up your studio?
SB: I’ve been in studios in DUMBO for over ten years, and I just needed a break. Sometimes you have to stop what you’re doing in your personal bubble and look up. This is that kind of period for me. I didn’t want to relive another four years of this administration by doing the same thing I did the last four years, because it didn’t work. It made no difference. So maybe there’s another way to approach the situation. I have several small projects going on, and many possibilities, but I’m not ready to pick anything yet. Being able to move around is something that I’m interested in – moving around and being with other people whose paths I wouldn’t cross if I continued working in my bubble.
MH: What’s the best part about being an artist?
SB: There are so many good things, and I’ve been pleased with every aspect. I love getting up in the morning and focusing on the things that I want to. You get to a point where your work coalesces and you have a better understanding of what it is and what you’re doing, and the older you get the better it gets. It’s like a rich stew. You start out with a broth, and you throw in a couple of things, and you stir it for several years and then it gets a little thicker, and by the time you‘ve reached my age, the flavor becomes so much more complex and interesting. Had I stopped when I was in my 30s or 40s, I wouldn’t have reached this point, so I’m grateful to have had the opportunities I’ve had in order to keep going. I can’t imagine being anything other than an artist.

www.sharonlbutler.com

The artist will be giving a talk at the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts in Dublin, Ireland on January 29 .