I'll confess to never having heard of Butch Anthony before I read a profile in The New York Times on Wednesday, yet he's an Alabamian living on a farm on poorhouse road in Seale, near the Georgia line and Columbus.
As they say, a prophet is not without honor except in his own home...and there is plenty about this state I don't know.
But the only writing I can find about him is from outside the state. He's a self-taught artist, what we used to call an "outsider" artist till someone decided that was too negative. He puts on a combination art and music show called Doo-Nanny. I just missed this year's event, which was held on just two weeks ago.
Here's one of his 1999 works I found for sale online for $200:
Confession time: like the perhaps better-known (to me, anyway) work of Charlie Lucas and Mose T and Howard Finster, this painting (unframed) looks like something my little brother might have painted. If I had a little brother and if he painted, that is.
Why is it I always feel I'm just a few dollars shy of being punked when I look at this stuff?
Birmingham's Kathy Kemp wrote an entire book about these folks, and I'm proud to have a signed copy of Revelations on my bookshelf. No, Butch Anthony isn't in it.
That may be because it was published in 1995, a year after he started painting. (By the way: new copies of the out-of-print Revelations go for almost $400! I did some poetry back in the day and the best I've seen for those little books is $35).
Anyway, I'll email Kathy and ask about Butch. Maybe there will be a Revelations 2 and he can make the cut.
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