Lewis Buttery was born in 1995 and is an artist from Leicester, UK. at the beginning of the 2018/19 academic year, he moved to London to study Fine Art at Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts London) full time.
Time to unlearn some stuff. One of the most disrespectful things you could do as my audience is contextualise the work with philosophy and French literary critique, because fundamental to my practice is a rejection of the link that art schools created to those subjects in the 70s. Of course, I acknowledge that these things will have influenced my practice to some degree (critical thinking for example) and the same can be said for any subject though. So, my point is that contextualising art against philosophy should not be the default. It is not inherently relevant; especially for me, given my active rejection of it. In short, when engaging with my art, give philosophy the lowest priority of things to draw links to.
Everything ‘virtual’ has been the thread that ties my work together this year. That ranges from work that I made inside/with virtual spaces, to virtually showing work that exists in real space, to connecting with people virtually/remotely. That last one includes both taking part in zoom call events, like life drawing sessions and exhibition private views, and talking about art while in virtual spaces like video games. The pandemic has unquestionably necessitated all this, but it is my view that it was going that way already. The necessity has served to fast-track the validation of virtual practices. My goal throughout this year has been to fully embrace that.
I have been doing what I call ‘virtual photography’ extensively to validate it as a form of photography; screenshots taken within videogames’ virtual spaces that use the usual photography conventions. I had been thinking about the future of VR a lot over the last few years before COVID even happened. I am convinced that VR technology (like headsets) will be as common as TVs, computers, and smartphones. As that happens, it is going to revolutionise the art world. It has already started. NFTs excited me when I first heard about them because the artist gets a cut every time it sells. Then the controversy came up of how much energy it takes to create one and I was left unsure what to think.
In theory, NFTs, or something like them, would finally get living artists paid. I have been reluctant to sell any of my art of late because the way the system is set up right now sickens me. If art is going for thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions, the artist who created it deserves a piece of that pie. Then in terms of accessibility for audiences, virtual has the potential to help break down barriers to entry based on location and class. It holds the potential to solve the London-centricity of UK art: even the centricity of ‘the west’ for the whole world’s art. It removes the problem of having to travel, even for the working classes living comparatively closer but who don’t have the time.
Self-taught or art school?
I got into the art world backwards, practicing self-taught from around my 18th birthday in 2013. I’d dropped out of A-Levels a year and a half before that and then started working for a local youth arts charity in 2014. I spent the years that followed running art workshops in prisons, council estates, youth clubs, and schools: juggling that with Foundation Studies at DMU before moving to London to study at CSM (UAL) in 2018. So, I’m about to graduate.
If you could own one work of art what would it be?
I don’t know, because I’m not in the market for collecting art, but I’d still do it If I had the option to own anything just to decide where it resides. Maybe I’d donate something to a museum. I’d want to make it more accessible somehow, especially to one or more groups that the art world is inaccessible for. In terms of specifically which work I’d pick? Who knows, but putting something high profile in a working-class area would be amazing.
How would you describe your style?
Well, it’s like a combination of expressionism and street art. Those two separate logics or influences are how I express my chronic mental health issues and having grown up working-class respectively. But getting to the point of creating at all involves a lot of processing things in my head. What I’m talking about is less about planning out an artwork than preparing to wing it. I’ve got to clear the brain fog to get a clear view of what I’m doing.
Can you tell us about your artistic process?
I build my ideas slowly, scientifically, exponentially. A conversation will trigger me to have a hypothesis as a passing thought. Something will deja vu that hypothesis back into my head at a random point in the future and by then I’ll have all the new context of things I’ve picked up, learned, and processed along the way. That’s when I get stuck in, seemingly out of nowhere, because I’ve become much clearer and more confident in implementing whatever the idea is.
Is narrative important within your work?
I mean, no, I don’t think it is really. At least, not in terms of any that I’m placing within the work itself. What’s more important are the narratives outside of the work which then contextualise it. I come across way too many people with bad intentions, who want to misrepresent me by peddling false narratives about what I mean or what I’m about. It’s important to me to keep on top of that by making sure that I’m using my voice.
Who are your favourite artists and why?
I don’t have any favourite artists or even favourite works of art. But that’s the same with everything I consume really. Whether it’s music, food, or TV: I tend to binge stuff until I become sick of it and then go through cycles of revisiting it again years down the line just to do the same thing all over again. I have noticed though that the artists I like are most prominently from the same movements that influenced my style.
What or who inspires your art?
Yep, so increasingly what inspires me is media. Recently that’s included videogames, superhero movies/series, and songs. I spent the whole of 2020 doing abstract oil paintings using colour palettes based on skies because I noticed that the sun is a popular metaphor for happiness in music. Those are the same works that I’m showing in Flux’s V2 show. I was doing text-based work before that. They used positive affirmations after I had been watching affirmation videos a lot on YouTube.
Where’s your studio and what’s it like?
I’ve been staying with family throughout the pandemic, so my studio has been in the shed. After spending the whole of 2020 doing abstract oil paintings in there, I was feeling a change in direction coming on. The impracticality of working in that shed over the winter influenced what the change looked like; I’ve spent the first half of 2021 doing what I’m calling virtual photography, within videogames, with my studio now being a reclining chair in the living room.
Do you have any studio rituals?
Not sure what counts, but what comes to mind is how feeling safe and comforted are key for me to have a conducive creative environment. That means making myself at home with little things like consuming food / drink, enjoying music, relaxing. When I went from working as an artist to studying in art schools, I noticed how much stricter and more formal they are about that kind of thing. To me, it seems outdated and more about control than anything else.
What are you working on currently?
I’m working towards my graduate showcase. It’s what CSM (UAL) are doing instead of a degree show because of the pandemic. It works like social media, where each graduate gets a public profile on a dedicated platform to do what we want with. The other thing that’s different about it is it isn’t going to be marked. So I still have until the end of June to work on something degree-show-like even though I’ve already submitted everything that’s going towards my grade.
Where can we buy your art?
My art’s not for sale at the moment, at least not for traditional one-off fees. I’m more interested in passive income and in assets. If you’re interested in a sale that accommodates that then get in touch. As artists, we aren’t compensated if and when the value of our work raises. That’s why I was excited to hear that the second-hand market of NFTs compensates us. Then I was disheartened again to hear that they are not exactly environmentally friendly.
For more info, visit: https://lewisbuttery.com/
