CeCe Butcher’s Next Turn In An Artist’s Life

SOMERSET, KY — The studio of CeCe Butcher, the gifted Kentucky artist, is a corner of her home, fit for knitting or painting, close to the shoreline of Lake Cumberland. It’s an early winter day. Calm, quiet, serene. Light from big windows finds a flourish of long-handled brushes, like a bouquet set in a cup. Paints of every color grace the tabletops. A formidable leafy dieffenbachia does its work keeping the air clear from its big pot in the corner. Barely a ripple creases the waters of one of the largest manmade lakes in America.

The moment is apt for a woman who, over half a century, painted her way into the hearts and homes of thousands of Kentucky residents. Her realism oils and watercolors are displays of gardens and flowers, landscapes, portraits and figures all executed in a palette of sunrise and sunset colors. Given that her life and career unfolded in an era of external tumult and shock, and like everybody else, her share of personal challenge, Butcher’s work is a refuge of delight and bright cheer. Her paintings form a kind of defense against ugliness. They make you smile. They make you feel good about the planet.

In other words, Butcher never tried in her work to unsettle people. She wanted her art to please, to be charmed by light and color and flowers. It’s so central to her work and her spirit that last year, amid a raucous national election, Butcher briefly thought about and then stepped aside from making a public statement.

Here’s how she tells the story. Butcher was in Hobby Lobby looking for a flag to hang on July 4. She picked up a big metal flag, turned it over and noticed that it was made in China. She was indignant. So stirred by it that she knew she had to say something about it in art. Political art.

“I considered buying the biggest, biggest flag I could find,” she said, “and emblazon it all the way across with ‘This Flag Was Made in China.’ I wanted to do that so bad. But too many people told me I shouldn’t do that. That they might consider me a communist. So I didn’t.”

That core Butcher principle, beautifully rendered art that appeals to human connection and happiness, not dismay and disruption, earned Butcher a statewide reputation for excellence. When she enters competitions her work generates a stir. Four years ago her portrait of bluegrass music founder Bill Monroe was one of the 29 works by Kentucky artists displayed in Frankfort in the Governor’s Derby Exhibit, which honors Kentucky stories and traditions. In 2015, she was one of 31 Kentucky artists selected by the Kentucky Arts Council to exhibit in “Music Scenes,” an exhibit at Lexington Convention Center.

As an art teacher, she influenced lives and careers. One of her students, Anna Rogers, won second place in Rep. Harold Rogers’ 2013 Congressional Art Competition for Kentucky’s Fifth Congressional District. Anna painted “Empyrean,” a pastel of the artist with her thoroughbred horse and flowering trees on a farm.

What inner energy drives artists to keep painting, year after year? How do the fires of creativity stay stoked? One of the answers: artists develop new projects. Butcher’s latest project rests on an easel in her studio. It’s a panel in bright colors depicting a streetscape in downtown Somerset, Kentucky. It’s the first drawing of panels commissioned by the city of 12,300 residents that CeCe will paint, have printed on vinyl, and hung as banners on street lamps around Somerset’s central square displaying the evolution of the city’s business district over the years.

Butcher’s drawings are characteristically delightful. What’s new, though, is how she plans on producing it on vinyl, a medium capable of meeting two artistic requirements. First, vinyl is excellent for retaining colors. Second, vinyl is capable of withstanding the vagaries of south central Kentucky weather. A third value of images on vinyl: they can be easily reproduced.

Butcher last year discovered, by accident, a market for her art on vinyl during a visit to Sign By Sign, Josh Henderson’s banner printing shop in Somerset. She noticed all the work the shop does printing signs on vinyl. She asked Henderson about it. He replied that anything she painted could be printed on vinyl at any size.

A new gig was born, quickly amounting to the most popular and marketable art Butcher has ever produced. Word of her vinyl artwork spread fast and orders have come in from across Kentucky and the country.

Somerset officials noticed. One of them, city Tourism Director Leslie Ikerd, asked Butcher to prepare banners for each side of the central downtown square. Butcher’s approach is to paint one side showing the contemporary view of the buildings. On the opposite side is her drawing of what the same section of the street looked like a century ago. She plans to produce four such banners, relying on historical photographs to complete the project.

“I’ll finish them in 2025,” she said. “There’s a lot on the Square that is interesting and historic. The fountain. Cute stores on the north side. A new restaurant on the west side. It’ll be good.”

From her earliest years as a school girl, the youngest of three sisters who spent summers on a farm in Mintonville, Butcher expressed herself in images and art. She was three years old when she decided to be an artist. It was in her genes.

CeCe’s mother was a self-taught artist who launched her career with paint-by-number sketches. “I saw my mother painting one of those paint-by-number pictures,” she said. “I remember the look on her face. She was so relaxed and enjoying painting so much. I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do.'”

Butcher’s skill attracted notice right away. She drew sketches that amazed her elementary school classmates and flustered teachers, sometimes in an odd way. In eighth grade, she was paddled by an English teacher who objected to her sketch of a teenage girl with a skirt and a bust. “She didn’t like that I gave her little boobies,” Butcher recalls.

By the time she was in high school in Nancy, Kentucky, CeCe’s artistry was so respected that she painted the posters for football and basketball games, theater events, and dances. She was 15 when she sold her first piece, an ink drawing and painting of Old Ironsides, the Navy’s early 19th century three-masted, wooden-hulled frigate. “It made me really sad,” Butcher says of the $12 sale. “I did cry a little bit because I didn’t really want to sell it.”

That sort of reluctance dissolved years ago. Butcher’s paintings grace homes across Kentucky. One acclaimed painting honoring Kentucky thoroughbreds, the Appalachian landscape, and bluegrass music was the centerpiece of a poster for ROMP, the great bluegrass music festival hosted by the International Bluegrass Music Museum in Owensboro, now known as the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and Museum. The exquisitely detailed painting was purchased at auction and now holds a place of honor in the Owensboro home of Terry Woodward, who led the campaign to make his hometown the Mecca for bluegrass music fans around the world.

One home that displays very few of Butcher’s paintings is her own along Lake Cumberland. There’s a reason. When friends stop by for tea or an always delicious, artistic meal they insist on buying whatever new work she’s got on the walls.

“I don’t want to do anything else,” Butcher says of her life in art. “It lets me escape the harsh nature of the world. And I get positive reinforcement.”

Here’s another: Love your work, CeCe!

— Keith Schneider