My paintings are characterized by a tendency toward Casualism, a term I coined in an article published in The Brooklyn Rail to describe an approach to painting that values imperfection, incompleteness, and process over traditional color theory, pleasing composition, and polished forms.
In 2025, as the world as I have always known it began to fall apart, I was thinking about how the language of geometric abstraction, which I have been exploring since the 1990s, might convey something about vulnerability. Working with water-based media, starting with small watercolors and eventually layering and soaking raw canvas, I began using printmaking techniques to create irregularly shaped geometries that suggest the body, architecture, and dissolution.
I am also drawn to the intersection of art, writing, and emerging digital platforms. While I was a professor at Eastern Connecticut State University (2000-13), I started an online studio project called Two Coats of Paint, which has grown into an award-winning blogazine dedicated to painting.
Since I began painting in 1987, my work has been driven by the mysterious interplay between emotionality, intellect, and the act of painting itself.
Biography
Her solo exhibitions in New York at CLEA RSKY, Jennifer Baahng Gallery, Theodore Art, and Pocket Utopia have been written about in The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, artcritical, The New Criterion, The James Kalm Report, Time Out New York, Tussle, and New York Magazine.
As an art writer, Butler has contributed to several publications, including Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, Gulf Coast, The American Prospect, Doris Press, and Christie’s Magazine. She has also contributed to anthologies, including two editions of the Living and Sustaining a Creative Life series, and a collection of essays on James Bishop, published by Transatlantique in Paris. As a speaker, she has been invited to lecture at many schools including Brown University, Cornell University, the Hoffberger School of Painting at MICA, Maine College of Art, Penn State University, the New York Academy of Art, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
She has a B.A. in Art History from Tufts University, a B.F.A. in Painting from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and an M.F.A. in Art from the University of Connecticut. She grew up in Connecticut, lived in Boston for ten years, and moved to New York City in the late 1980s.
She lives and works in Long Island City, Queens, NY and New London, CT.
CV of Exhibitions and awards
CV of Writing and other projects
Image: In the studio, Long Island City, Queens, NY, May 2025