Käthe Butcher

Shopping Cart

Your cart is empty

Discover beautiful artworks to add to your collection

ProcessAugust 23, 20222 min read

The Words Inside the Drawings

Fragments of hand-lettered text sit inside many of these images. They are not captions. A look at what the writing is doing there.

Käthe Butcher
Arthaus editorial
On the work of Käthe Butcher
Dancing Alone, Together With You framed above a velvet sofa

Dancing Alone, Together With You framed above a velvet sofa

Look at enough of these drawings and you start noticing the writing. A phrase across a thigh. A line running along the edge of a shoulder. Sometimes a few words floating in the white space where a background would be.

Not a caption

A caption sits outside a picture and explains it. This text sits inside, drawn in the same graphite as the figure, at the same scale as the anatomy, following the same curves. It behaves like part of the body rather than a label attached to it.

What it reads like is thinking. Not a title the artist gave the drawing afterwards, but something the woman in the drawing might be telling herself while the moment is happening — which is a different and considerably more uncomfortable thing to be shown.

Why it is hand-lettered

Set the same words in a typeface and the effect collapses immediately. Type is public. It announces that someone has stepped outside the image to address you. Drawn letters stay inside the drawing's own logic: they wobble where the hand wobbled, they thin out where the pencil lifted, and they carry the same pressure information as every other line on the page.

Where it comes from

Her line owes a debt to manga, which she came to as a teenager after a childhood of Disney and Western comics, and which she credits with her taste for delicate linework. Comics are a form where drawn text and drawn image share a surface as a matter of course, and where lettering carries tone as much as content. That grammar is visible here, even though nothing about these drawings looks like a comic.

What it costs

It also means these images are harder to translate and harder to crop. A phrase running through the composition cannot be trimmed off in a reframe without taking part of the picture with it. That is a real constraint, accepted deliberately — the writing is load-bearing.

Share this story

Topics

ProcessProcessStudio

Stay Connected

Join my mailing list for exhibition updates, new print releases, and occasional studio notes.