Sharon Butler: Morning in America

About

For the past few years, Butler has produced daily drawings on her phone. The Good Morning Drawings, digital sketches uploaded to Instagram, reflect the peripatetic experience of a contemporary painter with a complex life—teaching, traveling, parenting, working. The small geometric abstractions serve as foundational ideas on which to build firm structures that investigate painting and its discontents more thoroughly in the context of a complex and chaotic world.

In March of this year, during the Covid lockdown in New York City, Butler had the chance to reflect on personal and socio-political anxiety as refracted by the diaristic nature of the Good Morning Drawing series of the recent past. The time in the studio was quieter, oriented towards a kind of distillation of paramount issues and aspects of the artist’s life and world view -- a kind of slow breathing exercise of the mind. This show represents an exhale of relief. We are still here, Butler still finds the lifeblood of painting closely connected to the roller coaster of the experience of daily life.