Tom Butler is a British artist whose show-stopping collages transform the materials of everyday life — crossword puzzles, printed ephemera, fragments of text and image — into richly layered urban scenes of considerable visual wit and formal intelligence. In his hands, a section of a crossword puzzle becomes a block of flats, a wine bottle, or a church spire: the found material not merely incorporated but transformed, its original identity still present beneath its new function, adding layers of meaning and a touch of humour that purely painted works cannot achieve.
His practice was shaped decisively by a 2004 holiday to Uzès in the South of France, where he encountered the specific visual world of the Provençal town — bright awnings and parasols against weathered stone, shuttered facades, crumbling masonry, and the huge faded advertisements that were once hand-painted onto the sides of buildings. "Maybe this is where my attraction to having text within a painting began," he has said. The influence of those hand-painted publicités anciennes — the weathered typography, the faded colour, the beauty of commercial imagery reclaimed by time — runs through everything he has made since.
Travel has continued to be his primary source of inspiration: Paris, where his wife is from; New York, Havana, Venice, and the Cornish coast, each city and landscape feeding into a practice that is as much about the specific qualities of light, texture, and atmosphere that places generate as about their visual appearance.
A first-class honours graduate in General Illustration, his influences range from the Impressionists — Monet and Cézanne for their use of colour and light — through Sargent, Kandinsky, and the 1930s poster artist A.M. Cassandre, to Norman Rockwell and the cartoonist Steadman. His Happy Chimes (London) and Happy Times (New York) originals are available through Creed Gallery, Ascot, for collectors across Berkshire, Surrey, and London.
