Niamh Butler

Niamh Butler, a graduate of the Lyme Academy and the Florence Academy’s Intensive Drawing Program, is best known for her portraits and figurative work with an extreme focus on rendered tone and detail, whether created from life or from her own reference photographs. She has come to favor a combination of black colored pencil and charcoal pencil for drawings, and oil on panel for paintings, as her preferred media. When working from her own reference photographs, after making initial decisions to change certain aspects of the piece while using the photo, she obsessively measures, make comparisons, and maintains a hyper-focus on creating smooth textures and transitions to achieve accuracy in rendering the subject. She also uses this approach with live subjects and settings to enhance the feeling of space and atmosphere in the piece, recently bringing some attention back to the surface of her drawings through carefully placed parallel lines that connect the subject to the background.

* This statement has been provided directly by the artist in association to their 14^th International ARC Salon entries. This content has not been edited for typos or grammatical errors and has not been vetted for accuracy.