 ike Proust’s madeleine, storms are epiphanous prompters of memory for Ruth Bilowus Butler, an artist represented at Monkdogz Urban Art, at 547 West 27th Street , in Chelsea. On her website
(www.ruthbutler.com), which is well worth a visit, Butler recalls standing behind the screen door of her family’s house in western New York on rainy nights as a child, watching the lightening, listening to the thunder and feeling “physically moved.”
 Now living in New Mexico, Butler finds inspiration in its storms’ skies and small towns, which, as she puts it, “provide the quirkiness and otherworldliness I’ve read about in children’s books.”
To achieve the dream-like synthesis of fantasy and reality that she strives for in her digital photographic art, Butler creates composite images from her archive of past photographs with her contemporary images of the Santa Fe skies, manipulating them digital ’ to create a convincing synthesis. The resulting vistas, often of storm clouds rolling over low- lying landscapes are possessed of great beauty and drama. They are also remarkably painterly in a manner reminiscent of the abstract expressionist Jon Schueler compositions inspired by the tumultuous skies above the Sound of Sleat in a remote area of the Scottish Highlands where storms were ever’ bit as prevalent as in New Mexico.
Butler achieves these painterly
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qualities by virtue of her skillful use of a stylus to subtly blend and blur her forms and colors in a manner that also calls to mind the great British painter J.M.W. Turner's characterization of his oils and watercolors as having been conjured up “with tinted steam.” For her effects are just that luminous and ethereal in pictures such as “Blue Line Storm,” the 2006 work which ‘as reproduced on the cover of the “abqsARTS” photographic annual, and “Cloud Kiss,” in which the white cumulonimbi appear to rest right on top of earthy brown mounds.
In the latter work, by “smearing” the pixels, Butler softened the surface of the mountains to bring them into harmony with the cottony texture of the clouds, uniting sky and land in the “kiss” of the title. Her tactile engagement with computer programs such as Photoshop and Painter appears to he as tactile as the manner in which sonic painters employ more traditional art mediums, enabling her to create effects such as those in “Painted Storm,” where the chiaroscuro of the clouds and the eerie light bordering the shadowy landscape recalls certain atmospheric details of El Greco's, "The View of Toledo."
Along with stormy landscapes, a visitor to Ruth Bilowus Butler’s website will discover a variety of other images: In “Golden Delicious,” several small apples scattered over a red silk woman’s top with shoulder
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"Cloud Kiss"
 straps
project
a subtly
erotic
lyricism.
In “Rear
View,” a
woman" Angel Baby"
wearing dark glasses, glimpsed in a car mirror, suggests a Garbo-esque elusiveness. In “Angel Baby,” four identical photographs of a child’s face, grafted onto stylized puttying and set afloat in a characteristically cataclysmic sky above a dark landscape dotted with little houses, exert an almost spooky power.
All of these images bespeak a prodigious talent, possessed a peculiarly compelling world-view and the technical proficiency to share it with the rest of us.
— Ed McCormack, Managing Editor Gallery & Studio
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Ed McCormack worked with Andy Warhol as one of the original contributing editors of Interview Magazine. He profiled film stars and popular recording artists for Rolling Stone.
Gallery&Studio Magazine was acknowledged as “a leading New York art magazine” by the London Times.
"However," says Mr. McCormack, "our (Ed's wife Jeannie) greatest satisfaction comes from discovering new talent."
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