Mike Butler

Mike Butler attended the Ontario College of Art for 4 years, graduating in 1980 as an Associate of the Ontario College of Art (AOCA) in Fine Arts. For several years he worked in watercolours and ink developing an expressionistic style. 

In the early to mid eighties Mike became interested in computer technology as a medium for fine art. In 1991 he created and maintained the Virtual Palette -- an electronic bulletin board system for artists that predated the Web. 

From 1995 onwards his artwork has been shown and published primarily on the web and has appeared in projects as a member of the Webism Group of World Wide Webists. His art work can be viewed at www.mikyo.com. He can be contacted at mike@mikyo.com

Artist's Statement

My objective as an artist is quite simple: to find beauty and joy in the manipulation of forms, colours and textures in a playful, musical dance that celebrates our ordinary world. My attitude toward the visual arts is that it is the visual equivalent of music. When I am composing, I am usually listening to Jazz and I work the same way as Jazz musicians, improvising as I go along without any predetermined goal in mind. As a result, I am always surprised by the images that emerge and I feel more like a spectator taking snapshots along the way rather than the creator. 

This is the joy in my work, meditating on the evanescent character of the forms and colours as they emerge on my screen. 

My process is to take images from my digital camera and work on them with Adobe Photoshop and Jasc Paintshop Pro, manipulating them to the point where they are no longer recognizable as everyday objects. 

Then the fun begins. I use a cutout technique to select interesting parts of the manipulated image, drawing the cutout with the select tool. this selection is then pasted onto a background image and then moved around into the position that is the optimal place on the painting for it. This process is repeated for many iterations with snapshots of the most interesting steps saved to disk for later publishing to on-line web galleries.

I am very interested in the challenge of creating movement in a 2D static medium. This movement is a dance of the visual elements in the image. I aim for a busy dynamic, which thrills my heart with joy whenever it works. Playful happiness is the goal that I am always working toward.