Meet NYC's Most NYC Artist!

Plus: Weird Trash Heap #20! A Pay Phone for Your Home!

Jun 6, 2022

Hello everybody,

Welcome to Issue #31 of CAFÉ ANNE!

I had a great time interviewing Jonathan Butterick, an artist whose life, in many ways, typifies the NYC post-art-school experience. His story has everything: Heroin! Rabbits! A sort-of happy ending! Also, his paintings are wonderful. I hope you enjoy this week’s feature, “Meet NYC’s Most NYC Artist!” below.

Regards!

Anne

Weird Trash Heap #20

While readers have been supplying CAFÉ ANNE with a steady supply of great weird trash photos, it’s been a while since I’ve spotted a good heap myself. But look at this beauty I spotted right on the corner of Remsen and Henry last week! I call this one “All the Sins”:

Yes, it’s got cigarette butts, a Reese’s wrapper, three Evan Williams-brand bourbon bottles and a number of used “Gold Emblem” coffee K-cups. The pill bottle is generic Tylenol PM, a sleep aid that will have you nodding off in no time. Plus: a granola bar! Here in Brooklyn Heights, we really know how to party.

Please send your weird trash photo to annekadet@yahoo.com and I will include it in a future issue.

CAFÉ ANNE SHOPPER

A Payphone for Your Home!

In last week’s issue looking at the supposed extinction of public pay phones in New York City and the replacement LinkNYC network, I didn’t have room to include my favorite discovery: YOU CAN BUY A PAY PHONE TO INSTALL IN YOUR OWN HOME.

Yes, there is a website, Payphone.com (“Global Supplier of Personal Telecommunications Equipment”), that will sell you a “real commercial payphone converted for home use.” Price: $279. That’s a third of the cost of a new iPhone 13, which doesn’t even accept quarters!

Just imagine, if you worked at home, you could conduct all your business from a pay phone, like a ’70s drug dealer. Plus, it doubles as a piggy bank. If you made ten calls a day for a year, you’d have saved $912.50—enough for an iPhone!

Available accessories, meanwhile, include a classic phone sign that “can help attract customers to your phone” for just $39.95.

A recent customer, Brent, left the following 5-star review for the sign:

“Advantages: Duh! It tells you where the phone is!”

”Disadvantages: NONE! No disappointments.”

The company behind Payphone.com, G-Tel Enterprises of Houston, TX, also sells phones especially designed for jails, airports and schools along with red emergency phones that automatically dial 911 when you lift the receiver. I know a few folks who could use one of those in their home as well.

FEATURE

Meet NYC’s Most NYC Artist!

My favorite place to discover new artists is the r/nyc forum on Reddit. The community is more typically devoted to discussions of local politics and crazy subway scene videos. But the art that you do find is all work posted by local artists sharing their drawings and paintings of—you guessed it—New York City. What could be better?

I was scrolling along recently when I arrived at a painting that an artist going by the username “Megabulk” had posted of a NYC streetscape titled, “Harlem Leaves.”

I left a comment: “This might be the most beautiful painting I’ve ever seen.”

The artist, Jonathan Butterick, replied to thank me, and after we exchanged a few messages and I saw more of his work on his website, I asked for an interview.

I couldn’t have been more excited taking the A train up to meet him at the café he chose on West 110th St., a few blocks from his apartment. I figured that if I liked his paintings, I’d probably enjoy meeting him. Or I wouldn’t like him at all, and that would be very funny!

While I had no idea what he looked like, I spotted him right away, occupying a sidewalk table. With his stripey shirt, silver hair, mustache and bright blue eyes, he looked like an artist!

He had an inky, worn journal spread in front of him. “It’s a prop!” he said gleefully, when I introduced myself and inquired about the sketchbook. “It’s mostly me writing and bitching about my life. Sometimes there’s less bitching and more drawing. Other times, there’s more bitching.”

I was delighted to find him as open and lively as his paintings. He also had a very New York story, which is why I dubbed him “NYC’s Most NYC Artist”.

It’s not that he’s been so successful, or has done anything particularly remarkable. Rather, his tale struck me as extraordinarily typical: he moved here after art school, got super discouraged, and gave up painting. Yep! Only his story, as evidenced by his recent work, has a rather happier ending.

Mr. Butterick, who is 53, was born in NYC but grew up in Austin. His first love was computers. He had an Apple II in junior high and learned how to program. But when he got to high school, he realized this was no way to make friends. His fellow geeks included a drooler, “and this other guy who had graduated a few years before, and probably hung around high school because he was a little pedophelic and had a porn star mustache at a time when that was not too cool…So I put my computer in the garage and never looked back.”

He started drawing and painting, he said, “Because I had all these complicated emotions that needed to come out. And besides that, it was the artists who were having more fun.”

He went to RISD and dropped out when he realized he was outclassed by his peers. “They were insanely good,” he says. “So I went back to Austin, Texas, and worked as a dishwasher for about five years, and sat in this cafe every day and drew people, trying to get better.”

“It's very funny that your solution to not being a good drawer was to drop out of art school,” I said.

“Yeah, no. I mean, yeah, I suppose you're right,” he said.

Next stop: The Art Institute of Chicago.

“What's weird is that I always wanted to live in New York, but I was terrified of it. I was too frightened by it. And so I just had to go to Chicago instead,” he said. “Chicago it turns out, was much more f—ing difficult than New York. New York City at that time was becoming more of a cream puff. Chicago was like broken glass, chainlink fences and gangbangers on every corner with guns.”

Still, he visited New York often, on holiday and summer breaks. “And all these magical things started happening to me,” he said. “Like, I got to do heroin for the first time. And I had sex with this girl I’d always had a crush on. It was always something. New York was this kind of this fantastic experience. So as as soon as I graduated, I got my s— together, and I moved to New York.”

This was in 1996. He moved in with the girl he had a crush on, who had place on Cornelia Street in the West Village. “It was a tiny shoebox of an apartment, crammed full of antiques because she was wealthy and had kind of fusty tastes,” he said. “I remember being horribly depressed at that time, and she was horribly depressed. She had a three-disc CD changer that functioned as our alarm clock. And we kept the same three CDs in it [Nico, Nick Drake and a John Coltrane/Johnny Hartman collaboration], which were probably the most three most depressing CDs I've ever heard in my entire life. My first year in New York was a little overwhelming.”

The East Village came next, of course. And then he and a few artist friends found a place in an old warehouse in—you guessed it—Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Mr. Butterick had no idea he was at the vanguard of the huge wave of artist-types who would soon transform the neighborhood: “I remember taking the train into Brooklyn, and looking across the river and seeing Manhattan looking really tiny and thinking, ‘What am I doing? Why am I here? This is really wrong.’”

He and his pals split the $2,000 rent four ways. There were no walls, so they created bedroom areas with tapestries. “If anyone else in the apartment was having sex, we would just crank up the volume on the stereo to kind of drown them out to give them a little sonic privacy,” he said.

That warehouse on the corner of Bedford Avenue and North Fourth Street is now—haha!—a Whole Foods Market. “The butcher shop is where my bedroom used to be,” he said.

The Whole Foods Market on Bedford Avenue

His art career, meanwhile, was faring no better. “I didn't have much of an audience, and I couldn't really see anything happening,” he said. “It seemed kind of pointless. I had a few art shows in bars in Williamsburg. But aside from that, I felt like I could make art and then nobody would see it. I didn't think that I ever had any chance of showing myself in a gallery or selling my work.”

I asked what the problem was.

“I don't know,” he said. “I do know that when I go to art galleries, I find at least half of the stuff unbearable. Somehow, the art market likes to pour a lot of money into things that I personally don't like. So it felt like the taste of the art world never really aligned with what I wanted to do.”

“What do you mean by ‘unbearable?’” I asked.

“I like middlebrow art,” he said. “I don't like stuff that is too obtuse. I don't like work that doesn't look good and is attempting to illustrate some theory that I find impenetrable.”

“I like your paintings because they are beautiful,” I said.

“I like them for that very same reason!” he said. “I like making eye candy.”

I later read Mr. Butterick’s artist statement on his website. “Paintings should be fun to look at,” he wrote. “This is my idea of a good time.”

I couldn’t agree more! But back then—and maybe even more so these days—the art that gets attention tends to be very thinky. Mr. Butterick has some theories as to why.

“People like to feel like they're being challenged with extremely conceptual stuff,” he said. “It makes you feel elite, if you can wrap your head around it. It makes you feel part of a privileged class.”

He recalls attending a 100-artist exhibit at The Centre Pompidou in Paris. “Every piece had a big laminated sheet, explaining what the artist was trying to do and what the piece was about,” he recalled. “First of all, I did not understand any of the work—zero. Second, when I tried to read these laminated sheets that would explain it, I didn't understand any of that either.”

To earn a living, he returned to his first love, coding, and found he could command a good rate combining his two skills. “I was working for graphic designers who were somehow computer illiterate,” he says. “They would sit directly behind me and say, ‘Can you move that up a scooch? Make that red? What if we tried this font?’”

“I hated office life and was not very good at that,” he said. “So as soon as the internet started booming and I realized that I could start doing that and work from home, I taught myself HTML, and have never set foot in an office again. The internet’s been very good for me. I was never hurting for money. And after a while, I stopped making art.”

“You didn’t miss it?” I asked.

“It was maybe my 40th birthday when I said to myself, ‘I'm not an artist anymore,’” he said. “I was really at a low ebb. It seemed pointless. And I felt like I was kind of torturing myself by having expectations to be an artist. I wasn't an artist. So it was kind of a relief when I realized that. I didn't have to wear that label anymore.”

What put him back on track, in 2015, was a new girlfriend—a fellow artist who saw his talent and encouraged him. One night while she was out, he borrowed her camera and shot scenes of the city. Pleased with the results, he used several as the basis for small paintings. “And my fantastic girlfriend encouraged me to keep doing it. And that's sort of how I started,” he said.

“Another thing that got me making art again was social media, and being able to make a painting and put it on Facebook and suddenly get 32 likes or something,” he added. “So you get this like dopamine rush from that, of at last having an audience.”

Mr. Butterick showed me some of these early efforts in the sketchbook he brought to the cafe. He had little patience early on. The work often looks a bit hurried:

“At the time, I was trying to figure out how to do the most with the least amount of effort,” he said.

Over time, he settled into his current style, adding more precision and detail.

“There’s a long story behind this,” he said, stopping at another painting. “The girlfriend who encouraged me so much dumped me on this trip. I was in Vietnam, traveling by train from Hanoi to Saigon, drugged out of my mind, I was taking so many drugs. I was mixing vodka with Diazepam. Bad, bad combination. I was really unhappy, so I painted this drugged-out painting.”

He had a few horrific nights (he asked me to leave out the details). “And then I flushed all the Diazepam down the toilet. I was like, ‘Wait a minute. This is not going to end well!’ So I ended up dealing with my emotional pain in a better way. In a healthier way. And now me and that woman, she's my best friend. Okay. Whatever.”

That “healthier way” turned out to be a self-directed form of art therapy involving—long story!—a series of rabbit drawings. And as Mr. Butterick got more absorbed into his art, his paintings grew larger and more sophisticated. We walked back to his apartment so I could see some of these later works.

On the way, I asked him his favorite New York neighborhoods. “Coney Island, Flushing, Koreatown,” he said. “I don’t have too many anymore. The places that I liked all seem to be going away. As happens in New York.”

Mr. Butterick has a nice, rent-stabilized two bedroom apartment—a sixth floor walkup. The walls are covered with his paintings. He got quite excited explaining the new techniques he’s employing, and it was fun to see the paintings in-person that I’d been admiring online. I told him so, and that’s when he responded with a little bomb: “I think I may be saying goodbye to New York.”

“What?” I said.

“I started painting New York pictures as sort of a goodbye,” he said. “Goodbye to New York. I think I may move to Hanoi.”

“What?”

“I need to think about if I really have the guts to make such a serious move, but it’s beautiful. And cheap.”

I asked when he started feeling this way.

“When I looked down Bedford Avenue and I barely recognized anything there anymore,” he said. “A lot of my friends have left. A lot of my friends have left because they've been priced out.”

This, too, struck me as typical.

I was disappointed to learn that my favorite painting—the Harlem scene that originally caught my attention—was absent. It had just sold for a paltry $150, to someone who, like me, saw it online.

Mr. Butterick says he began posting his paintings on Reddit during the pandemic, making the first sales of his career. He prices his art at $2.77 per square inch—a figure calculated to earn him $25 an hour, assuming a 12x9-inch painting takes him twelve hours.

He earned $3,000 in 2021 selling his paintings. This year, he’s earned more than $6,000, thanks to a large painting sold to a lawyer who also saw his work on Reddit.

It’s perhaps not surprising that he’s finally found an audience among people who aren’t necessarily looking for art. People buy his work, I believe, because it is simply delightful and they can’t help it.

“When the world looks strangely beautiful, it looks like your paintings,” I told him.

“Exactly!” he said. “Sometimes I get in an ecstatically good mood, and it’s that feeling I want to convey. I want to convey that kind of ecstasy and incredible optimism and happiness about the world.”

I asked if he once again thought of himself as an artist.

“I’m proud to be a painter again, yes,” he said. “It’s nice to have it back.”

His advice?

“Find a community of people who support you,” he said. “Dedicate yourself to what you do, because you will just get better. And don’t give up.”

He paused. “But maybe you do need to give up. I might also tell people, ‘Give up! Quit! Find something else to do if you’re frustrated!’”

Is there anything you’ve given up on that you’re glad to be rid of? Or that came back later—better than ever? Leave a comment!