801 Central Ave. Suite 33
Hot Springs, AR 71901

Phone: 501-625-7979
Email: info@studioloud.com

Hours: Thursday – Saturday,
1 p.m. – 5 p.m.
or by appointment.

buZ blurr
A.K.A Russell Butler

Lacking credentials for art authority I appropriated the blank spaces on the railcars as I walked the narrow canyons between the rails and practiced my own dispatch in the folk art tradition of chaulk and paintstik drawings of railworkers and hobos, which had been riding the rails for over a century.

Close calls from falling boxcar doors, broken chains on handbrakes, and squeezed between inadequate clearances, gave me the right to partake, I felt.

Outside of the hazards of railroad livelihood, a series of head injuries perhaps gave me the delusion I could elevate my repetitious drawings to the claim of purposeful monumental conceptualism, as some early prevasive practitioners had become the first human scrawl BRAND coast-to-coast, well before radio,
Coca-Cola, Ford and Chrysler. Icon and logo famous anonymously on the transcontinental railroad.

In April 1972 I discovered the existence of the mail art network, subsequent to the start of my use of the N. American railroad system in Nov. 1971. With these two outlets of expression, the 'low orbit' of global postal exchange, and the evanescent route of graffiti markings on the steel roads of the world's
largest physical network, I felt I had found my audiences, albeit captive.