Featured Artist of the month

Each month, we feature one artist from our Community Artists page here on our website, in our monthly newsletter, on Instagram, and on Facebook. We will also host an artist’s talk with them over Zoom so our audience can get to know them better. Check back at the beginning of each month for a new artist to learn about. And view artists from past months here.

April 2024: Kate Butler

We are very glad to feature Kate Butler as our Featured Artist for April 2024. Read on to learn about Kate, her work, and her experience with the Leo Marchutz School, and to see a selection of her artwork.

Join us for an artist’s talk on Zoom with Kate on Friday, May 3rd at 4:00 PM Eastern Time. Click here to register ahead of time on Zoom. And be sure to follow her on Instagram and check out her website.

About the Artist

Kate Butler is an artist, writer and art teacher. Raised in North Carolina, Kate studied abroad with the Leo Marchutz School community in 2012 as an undergraduate English major at the College of Charleston. After graduating, she returned to Aix-en-Provence and the Marchutz community as an Alumni Fellow before making her way to Brooklyn, New York. As a graduate student at the Pratt Institute, she continued to draw and paint while experimenting with analog animation before her focus shifted to ceramics and sculpture. Since earning a dual MFA in Fine Arts/MS in Art History in 2019, Kate has practiced, taught, and published writing in the field of ceramic sculpture while maintaining a regular drawing practice.

In 2022, Kate moved with her husband Sam to Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Her creative work and teaching remain deeply informed by the lessons on art, nature and perception imparted by the Marchutz School.

Artist Statement

Back when I studied at Marchutz, it was in Leo’s former studio, with its clerestory windows and courtyard, appropriately set on a hill: above the road and near to the sky. I find it hard to separate the lessons I learned there from the place itself, which contained and nourished the habits of art — the sketching, the looking, the discussing — that I was then just beginning to practice. Although these days I rarely paint, making sculptures in clay from a warehouse studio, my work is indebted to the insights that Alan, John and other members of the Marchutz équipe pointed me toward, by way of nature and works of art.

The air was so clear there in Provence— the landscape so saturated, so bright, so available to the eyes — as to confront one with the frailty of one’s perceptions. Yet as I discovered my own limitations as a painter, it happened that I also began to discover my own voice. That is to say, I began to discover my own light, as I learned many artists had before me: not by imposing but allowing the reality of what I saw to make itself known, mark by mark. I learned to face the subjects of my attention wholeheartedly, in innocence, without preconceptions. I learned that this is what it means to learn.

This education was all the more meaningful because it concerned the creation of meaning. Here were all these paintings that spoke to life’s ephemerality and to the infinite permutations of human character and the infinite ways that cultures had conceived of time and space. And here were we: facing the beast head on, staring straight into the scattered leaves of the universe. What would we make of them? I’m still figuring that out, but I still relish in the sense that we were all in it together.

As a student and fellow, I resonated with John’s architecture tours to a degree whose significance would only later become clear to me. Early in the program we read about Christopher Alexander’s quality without a name, and I had been keen to understand how this town had come to embody something of that vital, timeless character, not in paint, but in stone and space. In his tour one morning, John revealed to us how the streets and plazas of Aix yielded to human rituals and needs while embodying, substantively and stylistically, the character of the land. This moved me. Years later, after returning to the US and struggling to make paintings in white-box studios, I would find echoes of this as I began to make ceramic sculptures, inspired by patterns and nature and architecture. I began to create things that didn’t represent light but held and reflected it. I began to realize forms that I hadn’t seen but had sensed from the depths of my imagination.

My imagination was, and continues to be, nurtured by the practice of drawing. Patterns that I’ve landed on while drawing in fields in Provence or forests in Brooklyn in turn have later pronounced themselves in my sculptures: by way of a different process, to be sure, but similarly involving a dialogue with the stuff of nature. One series of cloud-inspired sculptures recall such fleeting phenomena as I drew in Aix, their sinewy forms reminiscent of gestural lines. Other recent works reference vertical landscapes: compositions in the manner of El Greco’s “View of Toledo,” — a painting I first encountered as a copy in the Marchutz Studio — tracing the relationship the earth to the sky. These, like other works of mine, thematize the reflection of light that is characteristic of their form: in evocations of the moon, or other motifs whose appearance depends on a light source that is absent.

If not in an entirely straightforward manner, year by year I find myself better able to embody the values and practices that I first encountered at Marchutz. I have been heartened to find echoes of the school’s ethos far beyond Aix-en-Provence: in exhibitions at the Drawing Center in New York, in the creative communities of Asheville’s Odyssey ClayWorks and Melbourne’s Art Room and School of Clay and Art, in the pedagogy of the Brooklyn Waldorf School, and finally, perhaps most significantly, in the work of Stanley Rosen, on whose ceramic sculptures I wrote my MS Art History thesis. Discovering Stanley’s work — informed by vernacular architecture of the kind we visited in the Vaucluse — was one of many reminders that art made with a certain humility and attentiveness can indeed attract an equally deep sort of attention from an audience. Such a sensitivity to realities of art, nature and perception is what I aim to bring own creative work and what I hope to foster in my students.

- Kate Butler, April 2024