Bold Thinkers
by Austin Nelson
Folk Artist
Butch Anthony
The title “Bold Thinker” implies, among other things,
sheer individuality. Bold Thinkers are accustomed to
standing outside the herd, as these minds do not seek the
acceptance or approval of the masses.
Butch Anthony is one such individual, and he is our second
offering in the Bold Thinkers series.
After unearthing several dinosaur bones during his childhood,
it appeared that he was well on his way to a career in
the biological sciences. The discovery led Auburn University,
where the bones are now on display, to convince Butch to pursue
a degree in zoology.
In 1985, Butch left Auburn and returned to his hometown
of Seale. He was unable to get a job in his field and made ends
meet by running a barbecue restaurant and doing, as he put it, “a little bit of everything.”
He was sitting at a store in Pittsview
in 1994 when inspiration struck. “A friend of mine, John Henry Tony,
started making paintings,” Anthony said. “We put it up on the window, just as a
joke, but somebody bought it. I thought,
hell, I’ll draw one, too.”
And so he did. And, like the first one,
that painting sold, too. “One thing just led to another,” Anthony
said. “I’ve been going at it ever
since.”
Almost 16 years and 6,000 works later,
Butch has quit his job as a restaurateur
and now makes a living as a full-time folk
artist.
Perhaps one of his most endearing
qualities is his ability to see art in the
most mundane of things. His creative
process starts with a trip to the dump. “I just find junk—old photographs and
old whatever—and turn it into something,”
Anthony said.
The ideas for his art always come second.
Butch said it just depends on what
he has available. Sometimes he finds old
paintings and paints over them. If he
finds a neat piece a metal, Butch heads to
his welding shop to see what he can create.
His kitchen table was covered with
one of his latest projects—a box of old photographs, which he was using as heads
for his hand drawn skeletons.
His work borders on the strange and the bizarre, of which he is quite aware. “It’s kind of weird,” Anthony said. “It
freaks people out around here, but I like
freaking them out.”
Most of his clients, he said, come from
out of town, traveling as far as from New
York or California for a chance to buy a
one-of-a-kind Butch Anthony creation.
If, however, you are seeking art with a
profound message, you best take your
money elsewhere. Butch says he does not
see any deep-rooted meaning in his art.
In fact, he doesn’t believe art has to have
any meaning at all. “I just like the way it looks,” Anthony
said.
Anthony does all of his work near his
home in Seale. When it’s too cold, he
paints inside his house. When it warms
up, however, he walks the quarter mile
down to his barn, which he calls the “Museum
of Wonder.”
From the outside, the Museum of
Wonder has the feel of an old circus freak
show, with signs and banners advertising
attractions that passers-by may find too
strange to be true. A step inside the
dimly-lit barn does nothing to shake this
impression. The inside is adorned with all
sorts of oddities, from a wooden torso of a naked woman holding an applause sign to
a stuffed otter with screws driven into it
and words and their definitions stuck to
the screw heads.
Butch’s workshop can be found in the
back of the museum, beyond the exhibits
and through a man-shaped cutout in the
wall. It looks like you might expect from
someone who works with junk, disheveled
and littered with knick knacks,
so much that Butch says it’s sometimes
hard to work.
He prefers books on tape to silence or
music, so he can work and read at the
same time. His favorite author is Henry
David Thoreau, the American author
and transcendentalist most known for his
work Walden: Life in the Woods.
Thoreau sought to live a simple life, as
self-sufficiently as possible, buying as little
as he could and obtaining everything
else from the land.
Were Thoreau able to meet Butch, he
inevitably would approve of how he is living.
Although Butch occasionally purchases
paint and brushes, his homestead
is built, like his sculptures, entirely out of
junk.
His house was built from the ground up with any and all available materials,
with some of the support beams salvaged
from an abandoned cotton mill. Butch
buys the things he can’t trade his artwork
for. He once gave away one of his favorite pieces, a sculpture crafted from a cow
skull, in exchange for dental work.
“People throw so much stuff away,”
Anthony said. “I am just recycling it. It’s
the old straw into gold thing.”
He even prefers some dumpsters to
others. He routinely makes the trip between
Seale and Auburn to see what he can find at a few of his favorite dumps.
Every once in a while, Butch will stumble
on something with real potential. “I found an old junk circus tent once,
as big as my barn,” Anthony said. “I cut it
up and used it to paint banners.”
On occasion, he is able to sell what he
finds before he gets a chance to create something out of it. Butch recalled finding
a banner from a traveling freak show
from the ‘70s. “The banner advertised the lobster
boy, with hands like lobsters,” Anthony
said. “I sold it to the people who made the
Blair Witch Project movie, so I guess it’s
just sitting in a movie studio somewhere.”
Despite keeping himself busy at the
Museum of Wonder, Butch routinely
loads up his sculptures and paintings to go
to trade shows. Anthony said he usually
can fit in about five of these a year. Also,
once a year, Butch hosts a weekend of art
and music, the Doo-Nanny, in his backyard.
Artists and art enthusiasts, alike,
have made the trip, to Pittsview for the
first nine or 10 years and now to Seale for
the past three or four years.
If you want a glimpse of a Butch
original, and you can’t make it out
to the Doo-Nanny, visit his website at
museumofwonder.com.
Chances are, you’ve never seen art like
this before.
To see this story complete with photos, pick up the latest issue of Columbus and the Valley at a retail outlet near you, or click here to subscribe online so you’ll never miss a word.
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