{"id":126099,"date":"2025-09-07T18:53:18","date_gmt":"2025-09-07T18:53:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/126099\/"},"modified":"2025-09-07T18:53:18","modified_gmt":"2025-09-07T18:53:18","slug":"former-kma-director-david-butler-is-at-home-with-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/126099\/","title":{"rendered":"Former KMA Director David Butler Is at Home With Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"August 2025<\/p>\n

When Iliana Lilienthal asked\u2014well, told\u2014David Butler she wanted a select batch of his pastels for Lilienthal Gallery\u2019s Deconstructing Landscapes<\/a> exhibition, he was caught off guard. She\u2019d spotted them in his South Knoxville home during a party he and husband Ted Smith were hosting. David hadn\u2019t created them with the outside world in mind.<\/p>\n

Each one depicts the Great Smoky Mountains, a subject that never really sits still. The flutter of leaves, the shifting play of light and shadow, the eternal mini-drama of a mountain creek \u2026 David attempts the impossible task of pinning down the fleeting energy of it all.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Iliana has impeccable taste and a mind like a jeweler\u2019s cut when it comes to curation. David agreed to share his works, but he\u2019s quick to admit he feels like an imposter. It\u2019s the first time he has appeared in a major exhibition. He was one of just three regional artists included (we profiled Gary Heatherly<\/a> last month), alongside others from Oregon to Israel.<\/p>\n

A little imposter syndrome is understandable. David has been surrounded, literally, by some of the best art in the world his entire career. Now, 20 months into retirement from his post<\/a> as longtime executive director of the Knoxville Museum of Art, he\u2019s still settling into what comes next.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\nHome\u00a0<\/p>\n

David and Ted\u2019s 1969 rancher, all brick and glass with a tiffany-blue front door, is couched in river rock and shade gardens. Inside, every surface holds a piece of art.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlmost everything we have in the house is by an artist who is a friend of ours or at least someone we know,\u201d David says. \u201cWhen people give me art, I always think of that person. And I always remember who gave me plants.\u201d<\/p>\n

Walking room to room, he narrates the origin stories: a wedding gift, a painting of their Wichita home, a reminder of an old friend. There\u2019s a plein air piece by Robert Felker of KMA at sunrise or sunset, it\u2019s hard to tell which, Victorian houses across the street reflected on its windows. A retirement gift from the Guild, Butler smiles: \u201cI think the sun\u2019s kind of me leaving the museum. It makes me happy.\u201d<\/p>\n

His own art and Ted\u2019s photography mix into the display. Downstairs, his studio opens with floor-to-ceiling windows onto the greenery of high summer. \u201cThe light coming through here is so beautiful at different times of the day,\u201d he says. A magnolia tree they planted just a decade ago now towers behind the house, framed by oakleaf hydrangeas and accented by coleus\u2019 swizzling of magenta and lime.<\/p>\n

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\nMaking Space\u00a0<\/p>\n

These days, David mostly works in pastels, with a side exploration of watercolor after a workshop with Jered Sprecher<\/a> at Arrowmont last year. \u201cNot much to show for it, I\u2019m afraid,\u201d he laughs. \u201cWatercolor is hard, and I don\u2019t like to do things I\u2019m not good at. But there are occasional flickers of maybe I could do this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Routine, he admits, is harder. \u201cWhen you have lots of time, you never feel that sense of urgency. Before, if I had a long weekend, I\u2019d lock myself down here and get stuff done. Now it\u2019s much more, well, we\u2019ll get there. I could create a schedule, but I also kind of rebel against that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even though he spent decades in museums, creating art feels entirely different. \u201cAlthough I was around art all the time, you\u2019re using a different side of your brain. When I sit down and really get working, the world just disappears\u2014time passes, I don\u2019t get hungry. But it takes a while to get into that space.\u201d<\/p>\n

Much of his work is tied to memory: happy places he can revisit through art. \u201cYou remember how you felt in that spot, and there\u2019s a lot of that encoded if you do it well.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"David Butler with Gay Lyons on a trip to Paris last spring
\n\"\"David on his way \u2026 somewhere!
\nTravel & Time<\/p>\n

The sensory experience of travel feeds that same part of his brain. David and Ted marked his retirement with a trip to New Zealand and Australia. Genoa comes this fall, the Aegean this winter, and a river cruise in Egypt next year. They try, he says, to be mindful of visiting places where tourism is welcomed. \u201cEverything is so crowded, and some places don\u2019t want more people. Like, where can we be helpful? Where do they want us? And that\u2019s fewer and fewer places.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ironically, David rarely spends more than 45 minutes at other city\u2019s art museums, no matter how large. \u201cI\u2019m a bad museum-goer,\u201d he says. \u201cAll I can see is how the labels are made, what the lighting is like. Plus, you can only soak up so much.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Smokies are an annual pilgrimage. The mountains are a muse in his work: layers of blue ridges and water flowing glasslike over rocks. He collects rocks and minerals, too, each one with a story. He points to a stone given to him after the passing of his friend John Thomas last summer.<\/p>\n

On a shelf nearby sits a classic still-life of a fruit bowl that he painted at age six. \u201cSo 65 years ago, and we\u2019ve somehow hung onto it,\u201d he says. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t Rembrandt, but I could draw fairly competently for a 6-year-old.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beneath it lies a scrapbook unearthed from his mother\u2019s house. Scrawled on the first page in child\u2019s pencil handwriting: The Great \u201968 Trip. It documents his first plane ride, from Florida to Memphis. \u201cYou would have thought I was going around the world,\u201d he says. \u201cBut when you\u2019ve never gone anywhere, anywhere is exciting. I got kind of weak, looking at it.\u201d<\/p>\n

At 18, he spent a year abroad in Italy. \u201cAnd I remember thinking, \u2018Oh my God, I discovered all of this.\u2019 There\u2019s no one more full of themselves than a teenager. But I can still remember that feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\nMemory\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s funny sometimes to realize we\u2019ve always been who we are. Looking around his studio\u2014at finished and half-finished canvases, books, artifacts and at least one Leaning Tower of Pisa parmesan cheese dispenser\u2014David shrugs: \u201cYou get to a certain age and realize, oh gosh, there\u2019s probably not going to be a museum dedicated to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maybe not. But all of us build our own museums through the objects we keep close, the people we love, the places we return to in memory.<\/p>\n

David told me Venice, a city he once adored, is now too crowded to revisit. But in his memory it still exists as he experienced it, preserved in the same way he memorializes mountain creeks and the bowl of fruit he sat in front of at age 6, through the medium of art.<\/p>\n

In one of my favorite books, Invisible Cities, author Italo Calvino imagines Marco Polo describing Venice through dozens of dreamlike versions of itself. At one point Polo admits: \u201cMemory\u2019s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased. Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.\u201d<\/p>\n

Italo reminds us that memory is slippery. The moment you try to translate an experience into words\u2014or into art\u2014you\u2019ve already changed it. The original image fades, and what remains is a kind of imperfect facsimile. Still, that replica matters. It\u2019s the thing that keeps the memory alive. \u201cMemory is redundant,\u201d Italo says, \u201cit repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"David Butler, Deconstructing Landscapes, Lilienthal Gallery, 23 Emory Place, Knoxville, July 2025<\/p>\n

\u201cDeconstructing Landscapes\u201d is on view at Lilienthal Gallery (23 Emory Place) through mid-October. Hours are Wed-Sun 12-5 p.m. Learn more at the website here<\/a>; you can also follow Lilienthal on Facebook<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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