Berkley Center

Georgetown welcomed George Butler, award-winning illustrator and artist, as part of the Berkley Center’s collaboration with the Pulitzer Center. Butler presented his latest work, Ukraine: Remember Also Me, a compelling collection of vivid and powerful testimonies from the ongoing conflict in Ukraine brought to life through striking and intimate illustrations.

He joined Michael David-Fox, director of Georgetown’s Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies, for an October 3 conversation on capturing not only the devastation of war, but also the perseverance and the individual stories of ordinary people caught up in this cataclysm.

Gaps in Modern News

Throughout his career, Butler has drawn and documented conflict zones, climate issues, humanitarian crises, and social issues. He believes that there are many truths of war, but the modern news industry has become a narrow spectrum that brings only a few of them to light. When the reporting is fragmented and piecemeal, hurried and overwhelming, stories get lost along the way.

“I have found that true humanity exists in the most vulnerable situations, and that the stories of family and pride and love and fear as we know them go untold in the modern news industry,” said Butler. 

In the hopes of moving away from the sensational, headline-driven quality of the modern newscape, Butler’s work seeks to recover humanity from horrific stories of war.

I guess my self-appointed mission is to be deliberately slow, to stand in a kind of romantic way in different parts of the world with a pen and a pot of ink and record what I see in front of me.

Combining Art and Reportage

Reportage illustration, Butler described, is not a replacement, but rather an alternative for the way we consume news media. In fact, there is a rich history of documenting war, conflict, and catastrophe through images, including the Illustrated London News that first launched in 1842 to document different areas of the world.

Though he insisted that his illustrations are designed for newspapers and not gallery walls, Butler’s mastery of pen, ink, and watercolor is captivating nonetheless. This includes his intentional, creative use of white space in his pieces.

“The economy of line and fluidity that we’re looking for in language or poetry or music and the space between the notes is the same. It gives you, the viewer, room to imagine what might have happened,” Butler said. “You can superimpose the stuff that you know about Ukraine on top of those images, and so it becomes more involved.”

This three-way engagement between the viewer, the art, and the artist is driven and facilitated by an emotional connection to the subject matter. According to Butler, nothing focuses the brain better than when somebody is sitting in front of you waiting for a finished product.

I spent a lot of time just sitting on the street and drawing, and soon learned that the interaction in fact was more important than perhaps the outcome.

In these windows of opportunity, as Butler describes them, people feel more at home to tell their stories. 

Hope Behind the Headlines

While reporting on the war in Ukraine for his latest work, Butler created art that goes beyond mere representation. The book is full of “truths that you won’t always find on the front pages,” moments of ordinary people and common human experience.

I think perhaps the book’s greatest fault is that they are ordinary stories, the stories of people who had war delivered on their lives and reacted to it. They don’t want to be known as heroes, they don’t really want to be interviewed, but they do because they think it might make a difference.

During these encounters with the subjects of his drawings, Butler was met with an unbelievable resolve, hope, and drive among Ukrainians. From behind his drawing board, he created a living history of people making choices, carrying on, and persisting. He hopes that these narratives of resilience become the enduring part of his work.

“As a younger man, I thought the point of it was to try and make the most accurate picture possible in painstakingly slow pen and ink drawings, copying down everything in front of me. But as I spend more time in these places, I realize that actually it’s important to have something that looks good so people look at it, but in fact the words will be the bit that people remember.”