By Jeff Klinkenberg
Times Staff Writer
An endless highway. A doctor's office. A struggling artist.
The highway could be any Florida highway, but this one is U.S.
27, along the spine of the peninsula. It could be any the middle of the state. The
struggling artist could be a number of other African-American artists, but this one is
Robert Butler.
The year is 1965.
Robert walks into the doctor's office and talks to the nurse.
No, he tells her, I don't have an appointment.
Ma'am, I'm not sick either. Ma'am, I just want a moment of the
doctor's time, if he can spare it. I want to show him something.
Robert got a tip to come here. Somebody told him the doctor likes
to hunt turkeys on his days off. Robert paints nature scenes, and he happens to have a
fine turkey painting in the back of his 1960 Oldsmobile Catalina.
He introduces himself to the doctor-tells him a little about
himself, his background and how he works- and then shows the painting. The doctor is
delighted, not only about the painting, but about the price:$35.
The doctor buys.
Robert returns to the highway, an endless highway that many
years from now, will take him to incredible heights and incredible places. Africa.
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Robert is part of one of the Florida's most
obscure art traditions. He is what his art historian friend, Jim Fitch, calls a
"Highwayman." Since the mid-1950s, a small group of African-American
landscape artists have painted quick nature scenes and taken their art on the road.
They stop at band, motels and other businesses, selling their
work cheaply and aggressively.
Robert, now 52, struggled in his early years. But no longer.
Through talent, ferocious work habits, a winning personality and good luck, he has become
one of the state's best-known natural landscape painters.
No longer does he drive 50,000 miles a year in worn-out cars on
sales trips. He doesn't have to sell his paintings for $35 either.
Some Butler originals now go for $7,500.
At heart he may still be a Highwayman, but today he drives a
Saab.A guiding force
Robert Butler moved to Okeechobee
with his mother when he was 4. They were dirt poor. Annie Tolifer Butler picked tomatoes
and waited tables in restaurants. She even found a third job, cleaning motel rooms.
"I know now my mother was a unique, unique
woman," Robert says in a crisp baritone that sounds formal. |
"She was one of those people who believed you
could accomplish anything if you worked hard enough."
In 1955, a white businessman lent her $5,000. She invested
in a boarding house. With her profit, she bought a restaurant. She liked visiting
demolition sites to buy the best of the used lumber at cut-rate prices. With the lumber
she'd put up other boarding houses, saving money by laying building foundations herself.
She lived long enough to see her work ethic take root in
her son.
As a boy, Robert sat in the school playground and drew
pictures. He loved hunting- mostly rabbits, but some hogs and deer- and he is convinced
his hunting background helps him as an artist. He says a hunter, like a landscape painter,
has to be attuned to the environment in a special way he has to be able to
"read" the land.
He graduated from an all-black high school, but the only job he
found was mowing lawns or doing maintenance work at dairies. Still, he kept painting. One
lawn customer was so impressed by Robert's art that he bought him an $11 set of oil
paints. Then the man got Robert work as a hospital orderly. Robert sold paintings to
hospital doctors, who referred him to other potential customers.
Okeechobee's librarian gave him $25 to take a correspondence art
course. |
Another doctor commissioned Robert to paint a
picture of a favorite Appaloosa horse. Robert painted the picture 40 times before the
doctor bought it. "What that man taught me was the importance of detail," Robert
says.
Good ol' boys gobbled up his inexpensive hunting scenes. Jim
Fitch helped too. They became friends after Jim bought one of Robert's paintings. Later,
Jim built frames for Robert's paintings and advised him about his career. Jim opened the
Kissimmee Valley Gallery in Sebring and hopes to establish Florida's Museum of Art and
Culture. He researches the Highwaymen and remains one of Robert's biggest fans.
Okeechobee, some folks will tell you, might be the heart of
Florida's redneck belt. But many who helped Robert along the way were white.
"We all know there was racial prejudice in Florida in the
1950s and 1960s," Robert says. But he cannot remember-says he has chosen not to
remember-ever being the victim of racism.
"Okeechobee was the deep South, you understand, and the Civil
Rights era was going on, and there was so much anxiety about race. But that town just
about adopted me."
Robert says he sometimes asks himself why.
"I'd like to think it was the art that bridged all those
potential conflicts."
Robert quit his hospital orderly job so he could paint full-time.
He was married and the first of nine children had been born.
"I had to take the chance," he says. "I was swimming in
this fantastic psychological soup a the time: I came from this poor background and yet
this door was opening wide for me, to this universe that could be explored forever. I
wanted to paint as much as I could, as often as I could. I stepped through the door and
never looked back."A loner in his element
As Robert Butler began painting full-time in Okeechobee, other African-American
painters were busy in Fort Pierce, which is where the Highwayman tradition was born. Like
Robert, the other men worked quickly, priced their art cheaply, traveled state highways
widely and sold their work aggressively.
Robert was in it for the money too. But unlike the others,
city men who often worked together as a team, Robert felt most comfortable in the
wilderness and painted alone.
He would paint furiously for weeks, load his art into one of his
chewing-gum-and-baling-wire station wagons and stay on the road until every painting was
sold. Robert is tall and handsome, with prominent cheekbones and a mustache that makes him
look like Otis Redding. He's a sharp dresser and always took pride in his appearance on
sales trips. He'd stop at doctor offices and lawyer offices and motel offices and banks.
If someone bought a painting, Robert always asked for a referral.
Then he'd go there. Ranchers, he found, especially loved his landscapes. They'd invite him
to their spreads, he'd make a quick sketch, maybe make some field notes and come back a
few days later with a painting.
Sometimes he made random stops. One time his old Oldsmobile began
whining like a monstrous swarm of yellow jackets, and he pulled into a filling station in
Haines City. A new rear wheel bearing was going to cost more money than he had. He traded
a turkey painting and $20 for the mechanical work.
Turkey paintings were his bread and butter. Turkey hunters loved
them. He jokes that when a landscape was giving him trouble, he'd simply paint a turkey
into the scene and it would sell.
He advertised in outdoor magazines, and began selling prints of
his work by the hundreds. His work improved and his career caught fire. Eventually he
moved to Lakeland and opened his own gallery.
A multitude of meanings
Robert and Dorothy have been married
32 years. They live in a pretty suburb. There is a nice pastel rendering of a waterfall in
the living room and a painting of a rose in the bedroom. Robert didn't paint them.
"We can't afford a Butler painting," Robert says.
A cheerful, soft-spoken woman, Dorothy has had to be
mother and father to their children when Robert has been on the road. "I know how
Robert works," she says. Dorothy likes to think she has given Robert the freedom to
become the best artist he could be.
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| A Favorite:
This work, entitled "Quiet Symphony" is one of Robert Butler's favorite Florida
paintings. He says such places are disappearing throughout Florida because of development.
He thinks of himself as "a historian with a paintbrush." |
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| Real Florida: Robert
Butler likes to capture aspects of Florida life, such as this painting of a Central
Florida cattle drive. |
Some Butler paintings manage to
celebrate natural Florida while at the same time mourning its passing. The places he
paints are still there, but they are disappearing under what some people in Florida call
"progress." Robert says he wants to paint these wonderful places before they're
gone.
Robert is an unusual artist, Jim Fitch likes to say, one who is
left-brained and right-brained. In other words, Robert is artistic and coldly analytical.
He paintings have and otherworldly light to them: the light almost gives them a churchlike
quality.At the same time, his work is finely detailed. He is famous for interviewing
biologists, botanists, zoologists and even soil specialists for details he can use. If he
knows the soil, he knows what plants grow there. If he knows the plants, he knows the
animals.
He remembers the time he was commissioned to paint a bear hunt
for the cover of Florida
Wildlife magazine. He researched for days, finding out that many hunters
used dogs, and that sometimes those dogs were branded with the initials of the hunters.
Robert painted an angry bear, surrounded by hunting dogs, all of
them wearing brands. He drove to Miami and delivered the painting to the printing company.
On the way home, he began to worry that maybe painting the dogs with brands on them was a
mistake. Maybe animal rights people would see the painting and protest. He might be blamed
for the controversy.
He drove back to the printing company and painted out the brands.
He felt better until the next day. Then he realized he had made
the wrong decision. He had changed the facts. He drove back to Miami and painted the
brands back onto the dogs.
The road is calling
For Robert, life has an improvised
quality. Sometimes he jams canvases and paints into his prized 1972 four-wheel drive Chevy
Suburban and backs out the driveway with no destination in mind.
"I just point the car and go."
Sometimes he goes for days.
"When I see an interesting landscape I'll stop and start
painting. I want to document Florida. I think of myself as a historian with a
paintbrush."
Robert did a series of paintings on the Myakka River and a series
on cattle ranching and cowboys. He painted the Okefenokee Swamp, where his easel fell off
a dock into the dark water, never to be recovered. His latest project involves organizing
the state's finest landscape artists to do the definitive series of paintings on the
Everglades.
Sometimes Jim Fitch can't find Robert, who doesn't answer Jim's
phone calls. Dorothy can't help Jim. Often she doesn't know where Robert is, either. It
can be irritating, but they both understand. When Robert's brain is boiling with ideas, he
up and disappears. He hides in a motel, unplugs the phone and sets up his canvases.
"Creativity, by its very nature, is about exploration,"
Robert says. "You have to have at least the illusion of being free to explore your
ideas. For me, that means going to a place where I can shut out all distractions. Nobody
can call me I don't watch TV and I don't listen to the radio. I paint."
One evening he ends up at a Howard Johnson's in Tampa. It might
seem odd to people who'd expect Robert to do the nitty-gritty of his work in the middle of
the deep woods, or a great swamp, but he considers a motel the perfect place to pull an
all-night paint marathon. Referring to field notes or quick sketches done in the field, he
will work without distraction, unaware of either the clock or the outside world. |
"I can do as many as five paintings in a
good night," he says, eating a hot dog at Mel's while rush hour traffic streams by on
Busch Boulevard. "I work on them at the same time, a little at a time. I'll start one
and then move on the next and then on to the next. If a particular painting inspires me, I
may finish it before moving along. I've worked as long as 18 straight hours-I want to take
advantage of the inspiration when it's there. I once did 20 paintings in four days. I
worked so intensely I hurt my shoulder. It still bothers me."
Jim Fitch worries that Robert's normal urge to paint frequently-a
habit from his early Highwayman years when he had to -may be bad for his art.
"Do you truly want to be a painter?" Jim asks him.
"What Jim means is are you painting because you want to make money or are you
painting from the heart?" Robert says.
"When I first started painting, making money was everything.
I was the driving force. Dorothy and I had nine children. Listen, there is nothing in the
world like nine children to get you up on your feet and out the door painting and
selling."
Those days are mostly over, he says. Now customers come to him.
He has an agent to market his work and to schedule appearances at galleries and art
classes. He tries to go on the road only when he wants to. He paints less, he likes to
think, but he paints better.
He thinks his masterpiece lies ahead of him.
He has felt that way since he made the ultimate Highwayman
journey, to Africa.A journey of another kind
Robert Butler brought his paints and brushes. He
felt he was on some kind of beautiful mission. Six or seven generations ago, people in his
family ere taken from Africa and shipped to America as slaves. Now, in the summer of 1993,
Robert was going back.
"I was going to re-experience Africa for my ancestors
through my paintings."
In Tanzania, in Southeast Africa, he hired someone to take him
into the country. Miles outside of a big city called Arusha, he stopped on the Masai
Steppe. The high plains are about 3,000 feet above sea level. He could see a long
way, but not the 85 miles to 19,000-foot Mount Kilimanjaro, invisible, for the moment, in
the African haze. He painted the high plains that stretched toward the mountain and the
ostriches on the plains and the dust raised by Masai warriors driving their cattle.
Then Robert moved on.
At his next stop, a small village, he began painting again.
A mighty crowd gathered around him, a black stranger dressed like
a foreigner. Nobody spoke English, and he couldn't speak their Swahili dialect. Tuning out
their murmurs, he painted background first, the plains and the scrub trees rising on
foothills giving way to distant mountain ranges. Then, into the foreground, he painted the
stone huts of the village. The murmuring grew louder. As he painted, a woman carrying a
baby on her back walked between huts. Robert quickly painted the woman and her baby into
the scene.
The crowd erupted with joy. They recognized themselves.
A small child, a boy, pushed in front of him and stood inches
from the painting. He looked back at Robert and then looked at Robert's painting again.
The boy reached up and touched it, as if to see whether the painting were real or an
illusion.
"I don't see light the same since Africa," Robert tells
people now. "I see colors I didn't see before. I'm capturing more emotional flux in
my work. I'm so fired up I'd like to repaint every painting I've ever done."
Through an interpreter, an African man asked where Robert
had come from. Robert hunkered down and used his finger to draw a picture on the ultimate
canvas, the Earth. He drew the North American and African continents and the ocean
separating them. Robert pointed to Florida.
The African looked confused.
He wanted to know: How many days' walk?
Robert, the Highwayman who had come so far, in so many
ways, looked the man in the eye.
Robert didn't know how he could possibly explain.
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| A NEW LIGHT: In Tanzania, Robert set up
his easel in a Masai village and began painting. "I don't see light the same since
Africa," he says |
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