Daniel Butcher

For more than thirty years, I have created abstract images. For the past 4 years, my interest has shifted towards figurative painting, mostly faces and figures.

When I started as a painter, I primarily worked with collage, using charcoal on paper to write texts and draw black-and-white pictures. I would then tear these pictures up and using the pieces create abstract paintings. Using this same technique, I then made collages on large wooden panels. This got me interested in the technique of fresco and I started to cover my surfaces with plaster to later draw on.

When working on my large abstract panels, I often saw the appearance of facial features; a mouth, a nose, an eye… These were accidental, but they were so vivid that I was pulled towards exploring them conciously, researching the range of human expressions and presence.

In my work I use plaster, pigments, charcoal and pastel. I love to use plaster because it allows me to scratch the surface, color it, erase it, and uncover underlying layers. This choice of materials and method conveys a very sculptural feeling and quality to the work. Behind every finished face, there are more then twenty other faces which I have seen appear, then discarded and tranformed.

My paintings are my statement. I am more interested in the "doing" than in the "saying" : meaning comes out of the process rather than preceeding it.