etc.

Intertwangleism

Butch Anthony has a word – a word which he concocted himself. A word which he designed to precisely describe his unique personal style of art and artistic discovery. That word is “intertwangleism.”

Intertwangleism, as an artistic style, appears to be part cubism, part da-da, part expressionism, part science, part spirit, and, not at all least, part tongue-in-cheek. Intertwangleism takes a thing, any thing, and breaks it apart into its basic elements, elements not of science, but of another scheme, a scheme found only in Butch Anthony’s mind. Butch discovered the rudimentary rules of intertwangleism many years ago, when as child he collected stuff. But back then he didn’t know what to call it.

Butch Anthony has been a collector ofstuff as long as he can remember. His first collecting endeavors were accomplished by walking the freshly plowed fields of his native Russell County, in search of, and finding, literally thousands of flint points, potsherds, stone tools, shell beads, and other prehistoric Indian artifacts that littered the surface of the Alabama ground near his childhood home and Big Uchee Creek. He also collected many other things, including dried scabs created from his own frequently injured elbows and knees, the product of numerous hard-driving bicycle calamities on the hard clay back roads of  Seale, where he grew up.

As a teenager, he collected beer cans (empty ones), by the thousands – “no two alike”, he says. He fondly remembers trading for one especially interesting can (which he still has). It was “called Old Frothinslosh - it had a naked fat lady on it. I would stare at it for hours”. He collected fossils from the cretaceous outcrops that occur all around Russell County, amassing thousands of shark’s teeth, hundreds of pieces of petrified wood, and scores of fossilized bones from ancient turtles, monstrous mosasaurs, and gigantic extinct fish. He became something of a local celebrity when a picture appeared in the Columbus Ledger of young Butch proudly displaying one of his recent fossil discoveries. When he was just 14, he single-handedly built a log cabin to house his many collections - the bones, antlers, insects, artifacts, fossils, bottles, tools, rocks and minerals, and lots of other stuff – a cabin that he still uses today as a painting studio. Now, as an adult, he says he collects “homemade shoeshine boxes with handmade foots on the top - and beetles that fly into my barn at night.  They are in this show.”  What would he collect, of all things collectable, if only he could? “A tail feather from a live Ivory-billed peckerwood,” he says, “And now’s my chance.”

According to Butch, “Collectors are a bunch of freaks. Most of them are obsessive about it. I give most of my stuff away and then I move on to something else. And best of all you don’t have to be rich to collect the junk I collect, ‘cause nobody else but me wants it. Lately I've been trying to collect this one butterfly that comes to my garden every summer, but I just can't catch him. I hope I never do. “

Now, using the expanded principles ofintertwangleism, based in the lifelong collecting routine that he’s developed over the years, Butch Anthony gathers, absorbs, classifies, dissects, and reassembles all things that his eye and mind encompasses and, from that, creates wonderful new stuff of his own making. Like Butch himself, his art is deceptive. It seems so simple and so plain -- almost impossibly raw and innocent -- but it ain’t so. Every piece contains the mystery ofintertwangleism – and that’s what makes them great.