Kathy Butterly, a.k.a. ‘Wile E. Potter’

THE DAILY PIC: I can never get enough of the ceramics of Kathy Butterly, like this piece called “Lickety” that I just saw in the permanent collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art. One thing that always strikes me about her pots is that they manage to have the wacky, improvisatory energy of a cartoon while being stunning examples of thoughtful, meticulous, innovative workmanship. Then again, I guess cartooning itself has a gestalt that’s full of action and change, like a sketch drawn on the fly, even though it’s realized by means of insane craft. The best of Butterly should maybe be compared to the best of Chuck Jones’s Roadrunner. Beep! Beep! (A.W. Mellon Acquisition Endowment Fund and Martha Mack Lewis Fund, Carnegie Museum of Art; © Kathy Butterly, by permission)

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