Artist Statement

Mark Butler makes abstract paintings animated by rhythm, compositional play, and a distinctive, celebratory spirit. His process begins with making small, improvised drawings in a notebook. Some of these carry enough charge to become starting points for paintings. As a painting develops, it often gives rise to further variations or riffs, in which compositional components are reworked and colours shifted. This process results in loose constellations of related paintings—each one distinct, yet connected by a shared visual language and vitality.

Butler’s aesthetic sensibility was shaped in part by growing up in Leixlip, Co. Kildare during the 1980s and ’90s. The otherworldly glow of orange streetlights on concrete roads and structures left a lasting impression on his sense of colour. Catholic iconography and stained glass windows offered early visual encounters with strangeness and the ornate. During his adolescence, the arrival of rave and dance music, along with its associated visual culture—absorbed through bootleg tapes and late-night music videos—became a formative influence, charged with underground energy and the allure of something new. Later, while studying Electronic Engineering at university, he spent considerable time studying circuit diagrams—elegant, abstract systems whose structured visual pathways subtly echo in the compositional flow of his work today.

Butler's work is informed by many artistic influences. Music and poetry are constant wellsprings, helping to shape his understanding of the ways art can function. He draws on a range of compositional approaches, from Classical Modernism to older visual traditions like Persian miniature painting. Painters such as Philip Guston and Henri Matisse have been significant. He is also interested in Outsider and Vernacular art, including children's art. Watching his young son produce a series of beautifully strange drawings in one sitting—then get up and wander off—has influenced his perspective as much as any painter.

His approach to painting embraces emergence: the joy of making things up and allowing meaning to arise through spirit and structure, rather than symbol or script. For Butler, painting is a generative act. It's a place to invent freely and give life to a series of spirited compositional presences. That process—lively and open-ended—feels like a small but meaningful act of freedom: a way of letting things become what they want to become, and celebrating them for it.

Supported by Kildare County Council

• 2024 Arts Act Award

• 2025 Arts Act Award