Following in Father’s Footsteps

When an anonymous Marco Island art collector set out to fill his walls with iconic wildlife landscapes, his thoughts harkened back to a meeting with the famous Florida landscape artist Robert Butler. Butler, who was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame in 2004 as a member of the Florida Highwaymen, was exhibiting in Ft. Myers.

The Highwaymen were a small group of African American painters who began painting Florida landscapes in the late 1950s. Only a handful of the original 26 artists remain today.

The Marco collector met Robert Butler in September 2013, just six months before the artist’s death at 70. Something the artist told him about his son, Daniel Butler, resonated.

“He told me Daniel was better than him,” the collector said.

“That's flattering,” said Daniel Butler, 58, from his easel in the showroom of Levy’s Imperial Tire in the Lake Norman Historic District in Lakeland, Florida, the same place his father painted for years.

Keith Register, a Florida cattleman from north-central Florida, is a major Robert Butler collector. He’s owned well over 100 of his paintings. He knows the history of the Butlers and Levy Harrelson, the owner of the tire store, who is also an artist.

"Levy’s is a hub for Butler paintings,” Register said. “I’ve bought a number of paintings through Levy. I commissioned Daniel to paint a Brahman bull scene. I have become good friends with Daniel, and he enlightens me on the history and style of both he and his father. Daniel is a great artist in his own right. He is the best of the Butler children. Just my opinion. He’s a delightful person.”

The Marco collector has already commissioned Daniel Butler to paint three Marco Island wildlife landscapes this year.

“I couldn’t be happier,” he said.

Daniel is one of nine Butler children - and they all paint. But Daniel said his father could tell he was going to be the most interested.

"And he was right,” Butler said. "Everything he did, he did it for nine people. Nine kids. So if I were to quit painting, I wouldn't exist. No way in the world I'm going to say I don't feel good today. Or no, I'm not going to paint today. No. He gave me a part of that legacy as he did my other brothers and sisters. I actually held it against my brothers and sisters that they did not want to learn at one time. But you can't do that. Everybody's got their own thing that they want to do. But I still let them know about it. I just think it's wrong. Every now and then, I give them a hard time. And they'll say they don't know how I do it. Sit in one spot all day. I say, 'You can wake up every morning and do that 9 to 5, right?'"

Daniel remembers as a young boy waiting to hear his father get up in the wee hours of the morning to head out to the woods.

“You wake up on the weekend,” he said, “and I used to hide my clothes under the bed. I knew he was going. I knew he’d tell you. 'I'm going hunting.' Warning you. Don't be up by 3:30, you're not going hunting. He walked by that room. He'd drop something like he accidentally dropped it. Whoever's going hunting, they'll immediately wake up. If you don’t, he's gone. So I would hide my clothes under the bed and be ready because I wanted to be out there seeing what he was seeing.”

"He would say, 'Stop and tell me what you see.’ I’d say, 'Well, let me see. There's a couple of trees.’ He’d say, 'No, no, no. You already missed the point. Tell me about the soul of the landscape.’ You know, you're out hunting, and he would watch us. And then he would stop us. He'd say, 'Go ahead, get on the ground.' You know, I used to look at him. He'd said, ‘Get on the ground and you're going to start smelling animals. You're going to start seeing things that you wouldn't if you were walking and being careful. Give your soul to what's around you. And sure enough, you look on top of the little limbs, there are squirrels. Or you look out across, there's a deer watching you. So you have to be able to carry that kind of a feeling into a painting to get what you want.” 

Butler said his father lives inside of him, and he hears him when he’s deep inside of a painting.

 “There is his voice and he's telling me, ‘You cannot put this in the public because it's simply not right,'” Butler said. "'Go ahead. Go into that painting. And when you come out of it, you want it to be right. Just because you're selling something doesn't mean you can overlook what other people can't see because there will be people who will see your work, who will understand exactly where you made a mistake. So you go back in now.' I'm confident. Because he said, there is no such thing as a mistake unless you purposefully make it. And most artists do that by trying to cover up something they hope people won't see. I can put in there what needs to be in there. I'm not panicking now because he allowed me to develop that sense of confidence.”

Just thinking of his father’s lessons compels Daniel to quickly sit down in front of a painting that he said is about 20 percent complete.

"If you look at this painting,” he said, "you have a solid mass, right?"

He quickly applies several blotches of paint across the canvas.

"Now, that's what you call an organized mess,” he said. "That's what my dad would say. That's an organized mess because you're the only one that knows how this is going to come out in the end. Now there's spaces between the solid mass,” he said. "It’s my ability to create space on a piece that's 20 percent done. So you go through and fix what you didn't see in the beginning. Like we're going to create an opening in the clouds over here on the foliage. Go back there and give just a small indication of being out in the woods, and you look up and you can see through the leaves. You see little bits of sky. I was missing that. You come in here and open that thing up and give it a more true rendition of a wildlife landscape. You can already tell what a difference it makes. So I get to thinking about this. In any landscape, the sun comes through. Maybe a portage in the back. The sun comes through and hits the edges of it. And then you begin to fade away slowly.”

"I have the ability to pick up a brush, and in my mind, from being in the woods, I'll say to myself, 'This is where the light will come. This is where the trees will thin out. And this is where the trees are thickening,’” Daniel said. “So now you go in here and you do this as quick as you can because you want to blend your background colors with your highlights. So once you get in there, you begin to move down. You begin to slightly darken your color. He taught me to pay the most attention to how your light moves. If you do not move your light in a painting, you have nothing but a one-dimensional object. When you add the light, you notice that the light on the brush is pulling into the dark so you get a dimensional glow. I just need that brush. Always keeping in mind the direction of the sun that's coming into your painting. There are trees that are way bigger than others. There are trees that are old. There are trees that are new. You can make an old limb that runs farther down than the other. I get that from my dad. You can see a path through the woods. You can see fog on the ground and you can see turkeys walking the trail with a Florida panther hunting those turkeys. All this I did not know until he showed me what I needed to know."

But Daniel didn’t set out to copy his father.

"I think every good artist is able to implement his personality,” he said, "so that people will walk up to the gallery and say, 'I know whose that is.' As opposed to saying, 'Oh, he paints just like his dad.' See, I did not want that. I wanted them to say, ‘Wow, he's going to be good as his dad, but he's got his own style.’”

So what does he think of his father saying he was better than him?

"I won't accept that,” he said, shaking his head. "You're better than your dad. You know what that means, don't you? I could stop right there and not learn anymore. This is why I say I'll never be better than Robert Butler. When you look at a Robert Butler painting that you like, your words are going to be, 'Oh, I just love that painting. I'm going to take that painting home.' You don't pinpoint one thing. If I get to that point where somebody looks at a painting and I ask, 'What do you like best about it?' And they say, ‘Everything is just absolutely perfect.' Then I’m on that same level. So I'm going to give him the crown until I reach that level.”

Daniel remembers many of the lessons his father taught him.

"Teaching us to always acquire some kind of knowledge about what you do,” he said. "Because if you don't, you'll just be another artist with a brush. No matter how good you think you are. And you have to remember, there are no such thing as mistakes. Okay? 'Okay, Dad, I don't believe that one. If I mess up, that means I got to start all over.' Not true. He had more tricks on his brush.”

He recalls how his dad would instill discipline.

"He painted his problems away,” Daniel said. “If he got upset with us, he’d say, 'Hey, come on now. You know you shouldn't have done that, right? Well, go ahead and take the plastic off of five of those canvases right there. Set them up on the side, get all my paints laid out, and then you sit over there on the sofa. If I need my water changed, if I need more coffee, you're going to do it. That was punishment. That's how he did it.”

Daniel said his dad could work quickly.

"My dad could jump up and come on the back porch for a minute,” Daniel said, “he’d say, 'take that plastic off of that canvas there and put it on the easel while I fix my coffee.' So I'd go do it, and he comes back from fixing his coffee, puts that coffee down, and by the time it's cold, he's got these clouds everywhere. And I'm like, 'Where do you get this from? That's what I want to be able to do.’”

Daniel said people will often ask him to replicate one of his paintings.

“They’ll say, 'Could you do me one like that?’ I say, 'No, I can never do that again.’ A painting is an emotional thing. It's just something you can refine, but you can't really control it. You don't get to do that.”

Butler strives for constant improvement.

"Everything you do,” he said, “you have to be making a concerted effort to try to be better than the last time. If you've been in the woods quite a bit, you've been out when the skies are blue, gray, gold or whatever. You can feel that in a paintbrush. Every painting has a soul to it.” 

Robert also taught Daniel how to deal with people.

“He took me to a Ducks Unlimited banquet,” Daniel said. “There were like about 1,200 people there. And I started shaking because I looked around, I said, ‘Oh, God, I don't know what to do. I can't paint.' So he painted the sky. He looked at me. He said, 'What's wrong with you?' I said, 'There are people looking at me.' He said, 'Well, why are they looking at you and not me? That's because you're my son and they want to know what you've learned. So did you learn from me or did you learn from the people?’ I said, 'Dad, I learned from you.' He said, 'Well, paint then.' So I put my brush in the water and I turned around and they weren't there anymore. I threw my hand up and I stepped up to the canvas when it was my turn and we went ahead and painted. So now I have to go into myself, but at the same time I have to communicate. Yeah, I have to communicate. So that was a good lesson learned. This is another reason I say I'll never be as good as him.”

Daniel remembers a late-in-life moment with his dad.

“For a long time,” he said, "he'd reach over my shoulder and say, 'Give me that brush. Here you go. Let me show you.' And then eventually, before he passed, he came down to see me. He never said a word. He just watched me. That's when I knew he thought I had it."