Contributed by Mark Wethli / Technical drawing – the kind we see in plans, elevations, and orthogonal perspectives – is not the obvious choice to explore feelings of isolation, sadness, or loss. For over a century, the painterly gesture has been the primary signifier of these emotions, while drafting has been the province of the designer and the engineer. Given this disparity, Tom Butler’s choice of this medium, in his show “I Became a Room” at Sarah Bouchard Gallery in Woolwich, Maine, is a surprising one; not for its own sake but the result of a creative process that transforms the art of technical drawing in unexpected and meaningful ways. Using red drawing pencils, rather than graphite or ink, Butler creates lines and patterns that are as genteel as a nineteenth-century calling card yet as sanguine as a fresh tattoo. This subliminal undertone is expressed in the delicacy of Butler’s touch and the decorum of his technique. Occasional shifts in line weight bring to mind the disciplined yet sensual lines in a Hans Bellmer drawing, introducing an implicit eroticism in the lines themselves.
The show’s title pushes these notions beyond personal expression into metaphysics. Created in his home in Portland, Maine during the first two years of the pandemic, the 80 drawings in the show (out of over 400 in all) reflect both the constraining interior spaces of the lockdown and the intensified inner life afforded by the quarantine. Amid this ordeal – which we all experienced firsthand, but each in our own way – Butler was also contending with his father’s declining health and eventual death, an ocean away in the Chiswick district of London. The drawings, then, have an elegiac quality as well. We see uncanny perspective views of rooms coming apart, but gently, as in a dream, punctuated with secret compartments, cut-away views, and enigmatic structures that occasionally reveal partially hidden figures. Ghostly, cloud-like absences also appear. The fact that drawings of this kind are typically used to help construct a space rather than disassemble one amplifies their unsettling effect.
Alfred Hitchcock said that if he were to film the sinking of the Titanic, he wouldn’t start with water bursting through bulkheads or the rush for lifeboats but instead four crew members below deck, quietly playing cards. Then he’d show the water level in their glasses gradually tipping at a steeper angle, even as the orientation of the room remained level in the frame (the same trick that enabled Fred Astaire to dance on the walls and ceiling). Tragedies infiltrate our lives in a comparable way. The better part of our daily routine remains familiar and constant even as perilous signs of dysfunction and collapse dawn on us more slowly, abetted by our persistent yet unfounded belief in an unchanging world and our propensity for denial.
In a similar way, Butler’s drawings illuminate an emotional twilight zone – a waking version of hypnogogic sleep – where our thoughts and feelings scramble to keep pace with the rapidly changing circumstances around us. This is not to suggest that Butler is at all unwitting or naïve about his process or its implications. The creation of 400 precisely made drawings in just two years (what Freud would call “an obscene fecundity”) hints at a headlong process in which the momentum of sheer labor and physical production precluded overthinking. This type of approach – keeping one’s head down and plunging forward – is the most effective way to channel inner voices and cultural signals too faint or inchoate to capture through more deliberate but inhibiting means. Butler’s drawings are a mesmerizing example of this process.
As if to prove their credibility, one of the drawings is used to create a three-dimensional structure, seven feet tall and built to plan. Dimensionally accurate, it includes all the details and characteristics depicted in the drawing. A bit like the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “follies,” especially popular in England, the idea of something that’s built to resemble itself in decay has both a romantic dimension and a surreal one. If a drawing takes root in the viewer’s imagination, urging us to fill in the blanks as to scale, materials, texture, and so forth, the literal version is more prosaic and unequivocal. The descent from the platonic to the real world is a bit like meeting a favorite action hero as a costumed actor at Comic-Con: exciting but disorienting at the same time. The structure serves as a kind of changing booth in which each viewer is surrounded by additional framed black-and-white drawings (not reddish, hinting that we’re in another dimension) and small, black-and-white photographic self-portraits. The only notes of color are neatly cut bits of red tape holding the unframed photos in place, suggesting some kind of displacement from the dominant red of the drawings in the gallery.
Reminiscent of Francesca Woodman or Egon Schiele, Butler’s photos cast the artist in silhouette, his back to us or out of focus, in exaggerated poses suggesting alienation or inner turmoil. A few vignettes, drawn on the interior walls like graffiti, mark Butler’s added identity as a tagger in his own show. Like a confessional, this space embodies a precognitive montage of memories, ideas, anxieties, and shifting identities, giving us a glimpse into the raw material behind the work. Returning to the rarefied, platonic realm of the gallery, these instances shift back to essences.
The gallery is not a large space, but through very careful framing and installation, the 80 drawings, hung in variously proportioned grids, make the room feel like Dia Beacon – spacious, elegant, luminous, and inviting, with ample room to exercise both the eye and the mind. Like other Butler exhibitions I’ve seen, this one is an aesthetically rewarding thought experiment, composed of disparate elements, which generates a restorative sense of contemplation even as the images themselves reveal an uncertain world in the process of slipping away.
“Tom Butler: I Became a Room,” Sarah Bouchard Gallery, 13 Nequasset Pines Road, Woolwich, ME. Through September 21, 2025.
About the author: Mark Wethli is a painter, a writer, and the A. Leroy Greason Professor of Art Emeritus at Bowdoin College.