Inside the Artist's Studio: Jonathan Butt in Bushwick
by Benjamin SuttonPage 4 of 7
Do you consider drawing something that's part of your sculptural process or a pursuit unto itself?
Drawing is something that's integral to the making of the sculptural works. It's something that I've had more difficulty with in realizing a show based on drawing. I think because I've had such of history of using drawing as a building tool that taking the step of not using volumetric material is very uncomfortable. I have made drawing shows, pretty strong shows, and it's definitely a possibility. But there is more of an innate attraction to building objects.
Your pieces often occasion encounters between grid-like forms and more fluid shapes; is that a tension you're consciously exploring, or does it come about more organically through your process?
Mixing organic form and more rectilinear building is very much what I've been pursuing with this recent work, and I think trying to get those two types of building to coexist and almost in some fantastical way to actually occupy the same space is very interesting to me. It's kind of this impossibility and they really don't like to interact—one works very well with numbers and measurement, and the others is this not unmeasurable but very complex curvilinear component. So it was a good way for me to set up a problem that wouldn't be easily solved or calculable that I would have to make a box do something it didn't want to or find a way to bolt something onto a curved surface that really didn't want to be stable. Formally it also opened up a lot of things where a motif or way of building could get passed back and forth between those two modes and be a kind of exciting, exploratory way of working, to see a grid work on a curved surface or have a very messy paint job that then spills over onto a very organized wooden construction and create a jumble.
You use color quite sparingly or tactfully; is that a factor that you're weary of incorporating in your work?
I wouldn't say that I'm weary of color, however, given that I am wanting to embrace the raw material in certain instances in the work, it does kind of dictate the way color functions. To introduce something that is pointedly an applied color has a much bigger impact on the overall work. So in these new works I've been much more hesitant to use saturated color or color that's too far away from the palette that's come up from the plaster and the other materials that I'm using. So yes, I've been hesitant to use color, but at the same time I think this kind of tepid application has been interesting to me, where there's this impulse to design and apply color and have that relationship going. So, yes, it's been minimal but important.
Has color, or lack of color, ever been something that's dictated your choice of material?
Color hasn't been the reason I've gone for certain materials. Materials have really been used for their form-building qualities and then the colors have followed. But I think of paint as one of the main materials in these works, so it's also in there by the way paint works, but not so much because I'm picking colored plastic or something that's infused with color.
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