David Butler, the longtime former executive director of the Knoxville Museum of Art, has stepped into an unfamiliar role as a featured artist in a major exhibition, marking a significant transition in his post-retirement life. When gallery owner Iliana Lilienthal spotted Butler's pastel works depicting the Great Smoky Mountains during a party at his South Knoxville home, she immediately knew she wanted them for her Lilienthal Gallery's "Deconstructing Landscapes" exhibition. Butler admits he was caught off guard by the request, as he had created these intimate works without any intention of public display.
Now 20 months into retirement from his position at the Knoxville Museum of Art, Butler finds himself experiencing what he calls "imposter syndrome" as one of only three regional artists included in the prestigious exhibition alongside international artists from Oregon to Israel. His pastel works attempt to capture the ever-changing energy of the Smoky Mountains – the flutter of leaves, shifting light and shadow, and the eternal movement of mountain creeks. "Iliana has impeccable taste and a mind like a jeweler's cut when it comes to curation," Butler explains, though he admits feeling overwhelmed by this new chapter in his artistic journey.
Butler and his husband Ted Smith have transformed their 1969 brick and glass rancher in South Knoxville into a personal museum filled with artwork from artist friends and colleagues. "Almost everything we have in the house is by an artist who is a friend of ours or at least someone we know," Butler says. "When people give me art, I always think of that person." The home features pieces with deep personal significance, including a plein air painting by Robert Felker showing the Knoxville Museum of Art at sunrise or sunset – a retirement gift from the Guild that Butler interprets as symbolic of his departure from the museum.
In his downstairs studio, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows that frame the lush greenery of their mature garden, Butler primarily works in pastels with recent explorations in watercolor following a workshop with Jered Sprecher at Arrowmont. "Watercolor is hard, and I don't like to do things I'm not good at," he laughs, though he acknowledges occasional moments of potential breakthrough. The creative process presents different challenges than his museum career: "Although I was around art all the time, you're using a different side of your brain. When I sit down and really get working, the world just disappears – time passes, I don't get hungry."
Retirement has brought both freedom and challenges for Butler, who admits that having unlimited time paradoxically reduces his sense of urgency. "When you have lots of time, you never feel that sense of urgency," he reflects. "Before, if I had a long weekend, I'd lock myself down here and get stuff done. Now it's much more, 'well, we'll get there.'" Much of his current artwork draws from memory, focusing on happy places he can revisit through art, encoding emotional experiences into visual representations of meaningful locations.
Travel continues to feed Butler's creative spirit, with he and Ted marking his retirement with trips to New Zealand and Australia, and planning future journeys to Genoa, the Aegean, and Egypt. However, they approach travel mindfully, considering where tourism is welcomed. "Everything is so crowded, and some places don't want more people," Butler observes. "Like, where can we be helpful? Where do they want us? And that's fewer and fewer places." Ironically, despite his museum background, Butler spends no more than 45 minutes in other cities' art museums, finding himself distracted by technical details like lighting and label design.
The Great Smoky Mountains remain an annual pilgrimage and constant muse for Butler's work, inspiring his signature layered blue ridges and glasslike water flowing over rocks. His studio contains collections of rocks and minerals, each with its own story, including a stone given to him after the passing of his friend John Thomas. Personal artifacts span decades, from a fruit bowl still life he painted at age six to a childhood scrapbook documenting "The Great 68 Trip" – his first plane ride from Florida to Memphis that felt like traveling around the world.
Butler's artistic journey reflects a broader meditation on memory and preservation. He references Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities," where Marco Polo observes that "memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased." This concept resonates with Butler's understanding that translating experiences into art inevitably changes them, creating imperfect facsimiles that nonetheless keep memories alive. "You get to a certain age and realize, oh gosh, there's probably not going to be a museum dedicated to me," he acknowledges with characteristic humor.
The "Deconstructing Landscapes" exhibition featuring Butler's work continues at Lilienthal Gallery at 23 Emory Place through mid-October, with viewing hours Wednesday through Sunday from 12 to 5 p.m. The exhibition represents not just Butler's emergence as a publicly exhibited artist, but also his ongoing exploration of how art preserves and transforms personal memory, creating what he describes as our own personal museums through "the objects we keep close, the people we love, the places we return to in memory."
