|
Liz Butler's work tends towards the small and intricate. She has always favoured watercolour for its brilliance and transparency, but has recently been encouraged to try painting in tempera. She welcomes the discovery of this medium, which is more brilliant in colour and can be used transparently.
Liz was born in Cumbria in 1948 and educated at Liverpool College of Art and the Royal College of Art, London. Specialising from the outset of her career in botanical work, she produced a sequence of paintings on The Seasons, which, with Michael Chinery as co-author, was published in book form by William Collins in 1982.
In the same year her work was purchased for the Tate Gallery by the Contemporary Art Society. Paintings by Liz Butler are also in HM Government Art Collection.
Represented by Francis Kyle Gallery since 1978, Liz Butler has participated in some nine of the Gallery's theme exhibitions, including Hide and Seek (1983); Wharfedale at Bolton Abbey (this 1984 exhibition was featured as an Omnibus programme on BBC TV and subsequently shown in New York); Tuscan Summer (1985) and La Route Napoleon (1992). One-person exhibitions with Francis Kyle Gallery in 1979: botanical watercolours and landscape miniatures; 1982: country walks and gardens in watercolour and 1993: miniature watercolours.
In 1999 she was elected a fellow of the Royal Watercolour Society. Liz Butler has also undertaken commissions, including a sequence of paintings of the seasons at Harewood House for the Earl of Harewood. Liz Butler was a major participant in The Art of Memory: Contemporary Painters in search of Marcel Proust (2000), a theme exhibition which, with new contributions by the artists participating, travelled to the National Theatre, London, in January 2001. In 2001 her work was selected for the Singer and Friedlander Watercolour exhibition and also for The Discerning Eye, curated by Sir Roy Strong.
|
