Read The Highwaymen, Part One

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An endless highway. A doctor's office. A struggling artist.

The highway could be any Florida highway, but this one is U.S. 27, along the spine of the peninsula. It could be any doctor's office, but this one is in Sebring, in the middle of the state. The struggling artist could be a number of other African-American artists, but this one is Robert Butler.

The year is 1965.

Robert walks into the doctor's office and talks to the nurse.

No, he tells her, I don't have an appointment.

Ma'am, I'm not sick either. Ma'am, I just want a moment of the doctor's time, if he can spare it. I want to show him something.

Robert got a tip to come here. Somebody told him the doctor likes to hunt turkeys on his days off. Robert paints nature scenes, and he happens to have a fine turkey painting in the back of his 1960 Oldsmobile Catalina.

He introduces himself to the doctor -- tells him a little about himself, his background and how he works -- and then shows the painting. The doctor is delighted, not only about the painting, but about the price: $35.

The doctor buys.

Robert returns to the highway, an endless highway that many years from now, will take him to incredible heights and incredible places. Africa.

Robert is part of one of Florida's most obscure art traditions. He is what his art historian friend, Jim Fitch, calls a "Highwayman." Since the mid-1950s, a small group of African-American landscape artists have painted quick nature scenes and taken their art on the road. They stop at banks, motels and other businesses, selling their work cheaply and aggressively.

Robert, now 52, struggled in his early years. But no longer. Through talent, ferocious work habits, a winning personality and good luck, he has become one of the state's best-known natural landscape painters.

No longer does he drive 50,000 miles a year in worn-out cars on sales trips. He doesn't have to sell his paintings for $35 either.

Some Butler originals now go for $7,500.

At heart he may still be a Highwayman, but today he drives a Saab.

A guiding force

Robert moved to Okeechobee with his mother when he was 4. They were dirt poor. Annie Tolifer Butler picked tomatoes and waited tables in restaurants. She even found a third job, cleaning motel rooms.

"I know now my mother was a unique, unique woman," Robert says in a crisp baritone that sounds formal. "She was one of those people who believed you could accomplish anything if you worked hard enough."

In 1955, a white businessman lent her $5,000. She invested in a boarding house. With her profit, she bought a restaurant. She liked visiting demolition sites to buy the best of the used lumber at cut-rate prices. With the lumber she'd put up other boarding houses, saving money by laying building foundations herself.

She lived long enough to see her work ethic take root in her son.

As a boy, Robert sat in the school playground and drew pictures. He loved hunting -- mostly rabbits, but some hogs and deer -- and he is convinced his hunting background helps him as an artist. He says a hunter, like a landscape painter, has to be attuned to the environment in a special way. He has to be able to "read" the land.

He graduated from an all-black high school, but the only job he found was mowing lawns or doing maintenance work at dairies. Still, he kept painting. One lawn customer was so impressed by Robert's art that he bought him an $11 set of oil paints. Then the man got Robert work as a hospital orderly. Robert sold paintings to hospital doctors, who referred him to other potential customers.

Okeechobee's librarian gave him $25 to take a correspondence art course. Another doctor commissioned Robert to paint a picture of a favorite Appaloosa horse. Robert painted the picture 40 times before the doctor bought it. "What that man taught me was the importance of detail," Robert says.

Good ol' boys gobbled up his inexpensive hunting scenes. Jim Fitch helped too. They became friends after Jim bought one of Robert's paintings. Later, Jim built frames for Robert's paintings and advised him about his career. Jim opened the Kissimmee Valley Gallery in Sebring and hopes to establish Florida's Museum of Art and Culture. He researches the Highwaymen and remains one of Robert's biggest fans.

Okeechobee, some folks will tell you, might be the heart of Florida's redneck belt. But many who helped Robert along the way were white.

"We all know there was racial prejudice in Florida in the 1950s and 1960s," Robert says. But he cannot remember -- says he has chosen not to remember -- ever being the victim of racism.

"Okeechobee was the deep South, you understand, and the Civil Rights era was going on, and there was so much anxiety about race. But that town just about adopted me."

Robert says he sometimes asks himself why.

"I'd like to think it was the art that bridged all those potential conflicts."

Robert quit his hospital orderly job so could paint full-time. He was married and the first of nine children had been born.

"I had to take the chance," he says. "I was swimming in this fantastic psychological soup at the time: I came from this poor background and yet this door was opening wide for me, to this universe that could be explored forever. I wanted to paint as much as I could, as often as I could. I stepped through the door and never looked back."

A loner in his element

As Robert began painting full-time in Okeechobee, other African-American painters were busy in Fort Pierce, which is where the Highwayman tradition was born. Like Robert, the other men worked quickly, priced their art cheaply, traveled state highways widely and sold their work aggressively.

Robert was in it for the money too. But unlike the others, city men who often worked together as a team, Robert felt most comfortable in the wilderness and painted alone.

He would paint furiously for weeks, load his art into one of his chewing-gum-and-baling-wire station wagons and stay on the road until every painting was sold. Robert is tall and handsome, with prominent cheekbones and a moustache that makes him look like Otis Redding. He's a sharp dresser and always took pride in his appearance on sales trips. He'd stop at doctor offices and lawyer offices and motel offices and banks.

If someone bought a painting, Robert always asked for a referral. Then he'd go there. Ranchers, he found, especially loved his landscapes. They'd invite him to their spreads, he'd make a quick sketch, maybe make some field notes and come back a few days later with a painting.

Sometimes he made random stops. One time his old Oldsmobile began whining like a monstrous swarm of yellow jackets, and he pulled into a filling station in Haines City. A new rear wheel bearing was going to cost more money than he had. He traded a turkey painting and $20 for the mechanical work.

Turkey paintings were his bread and butter. Turkey hunters loved them. He jokes that when a landscape was giving him trouble, he'd simply paint a turkey into the scene and it would sell.

He advertised in outdoor magazines, and began selling prints of his work by the hundreds. His work improved and his career caught fire. Eventually he moved to Lakeland and opened his own gallery.

A multitude of meanings

Robert and Dorothy Butler have been married 32 years. They live in a pretty Lakeland suburb. There is a nice pastel rendering of a waterfall in the living room and a painting of a rose in the bedroom. Robert didn't paint them. "We can't afford a Butler painting," Robert says.

A cheerful, soft-spoken woman, Dorothy has had to be mother and father to their children when Robert has been on the road. "I know how Robert works," she says. Dorothy likes to think she has given Robert the freedom to become the best artist he could be.

Some Butler paintings manage to celebrate natural Florida while at the same time mourning its passing. The places he paints are still there, but they are disappearing under what some people in Florida call "progress." Robert says he wants to paint these wonderful places before they're gone.

Robert is an unusual artist, Jim Fitch likes to say, one who is left-brained and right-brained. In other words, Robert is artistic and coldly analytical. His paintings have an otherworldly light to them; the light almost gives them a churchlike quality. At the same time, his work is finely detailed. He is famous for interviewing biologists, botanists, zoologists and even soil specialists for details he can use. If he knows the soil, he knows what plants grow there. If he knows the plants, he knows the animals.

He remembers the time he was commissioned to paint a bear hunt for the cover of Florida Wildlife magazine. He researched for days, finding out that many hunters used dogs, and that sometimes those dogs were branded with the initials of the hunters.

Robert painted an angry bear, surrounded by hunting dogs, all of them wearing brands. He drove to Miami and delivered the painting to the printing company. On the way home, he began to worry that maybe painting the dogs with brands on them was a mistake. Maybe animal rights people would see the painting and protest. He might be blamed for the controversy.

He drove back to the printing company and painted out the brands.

He felt better until the next day. Then he realized he had made the wrong decision. He had changed the facts. He drove back to Miami and painted the brands back onto the dogs.

The road is calling

For Robert, life has an improvised quality. Sometimes he jams canvases and paints into his prized 1972 four-wheel drive Chevy Suburban and backs out the driveway with no destination in mind.

"I just point the car and go."

Sometimes he goes for days.

"When I see an interesting landscape I'll stop and start painting. I want to document Florida. I think of myself as a historian with a paintbrush."

Robert did a series of paintings on the Myakka River and a series on cattle ranching and cowboys. He painted the Okefenokee Swamp, where his easel fell off a dock into the dark water, never to be recovered. His latest project involves organizing the state's finest landscape artists to do the definitive series of paintings on the Everglades.

Sometimes Jim Fitch can't find Robert, who doesn't answer Jim's phone calls. Dorothy can't help Jim. Often she doesn't know where Robert is, either. It can be irritating, but they both understand. When Robert's brain is boiling with ideas, he up and disappears. He hides in a motel, unplugs the phone and sets up his canvases.

"Creativity, by its very nature, is about exploration," Robert says. "You have to have at least the illusion of being free to explore your ideas. For me, that means going to a place where I can shut out all distractions. Nobody can call me. I don't watch TV and I don't listen to the radio. I paint."

One evening he ends up at a Howard Johnson's in Tampa. It might seem odd to people who'd expect Robert to do the nitty-gritty of his work in the middle of the deep woods, or a great swamp, but he considers a motel the perfect place to pull an all-night paint marathon. Referring to field notes or quick sketches done in the field, he will work without distraction, unaware of either the clock or the outside world.

"I can do as many as five paintings in a good night," he says, eating a hot dog at Mel's while rush hour traffic streams by on Busch Boulevard. "I work on them at the same time, a little at a time. I'll start one and then move on to the next and then on to the next. If a particular painting inspires me, I may finish it before moving along. I've worked as long as 18 straight hours -- I want to take advantage of the inspiration when it's there. I once did 20 paintings in four days. I worked so intensely I hurt my shoulder. It still bothers me."

Jim Fitch worries that Robert's normal urge to paint frequently -- a habit from his early Highwayman years when he had to -- may be bad for his art.

"Do you truly want to be a painter?" Jim asks him.

"What Jim means is, are you painting because you want to make money or are you painting from the heart?" Robert says.

"When I first started painting, making money was everything. It was the driving force. Dorothy and I had nine children. Listen, there is nothing in the world like nine children to get you up on your feet and out the door painting and selling."

Those days are mostly over, he says. Now customers come to him. He has an agent to market his work and to schedule appearances at galleries and art classes. He tries to go on the road only when he wants to. He paints less, he likes to think, but he paints better.

He thinks his masterpiece lies ahead of him.

He has felt that way since he made the ultimate Highwayman journey, to Africa.

A journey of another kind

He brought his paints and brushes. He felt he was on some kind of beautiful mission. Six or seven generations ago, people in his family were taken from Africa and shipped to America as slaves. Now, in the summer of 1993, Robert was going back.

"I was going to re-experience Africa for my ancestors through my paintings."

In Tanzania, in Southeast Africa, he hired someone to take him into the country. Miles outside of a big city called Arusha, he stopped on the Masai Steppe. The high plains are about 3,000 feet above sea level. He could see a long way, but not the 85 miles to 19,000-foot Mount Kilimanjaro, invisible, for the moment, in the African haze. He painted the high plains that stretched toward the mountain, and the ostriches on the plains and the dust raised by Masai warriors driving their cattle.

Then Robert moved on.

At his next stop, a small village, he began painting again.

A mighty crowd gathered around him, a black stranger dressed like a foreigner. Nobody spoke English, and he couldn't speak their Swahili dialect. Tuning out their murmurs, he painted background first, the plains and the scrub trees rising on foothills giving way to distant mountain ranges. Then, into the foreground, he painted the stone huts of the village. The murmuring grew louder. As he painted, a woman carrying a baby on her back walked between huts. Robert quickly painted the woman and her baby into the scene.

The crowd erupted with joy. They recognized themselves.

A small child, a boy, pushed in front of him and stood inches from the painting. He looked back at Robert and then looked at Robert's painting again. The boy reached up and touched it, as if to see whether the painting were real or an illusion.

"I don't see light the same since Africa," Robert tells people now. "I see colors I didn't see before. I'm capturing more emotional flux in my work. I'm so fired up I'd like to repaint every painting I've ever done."

Through an interpreter, an African man asked where Robert had come from. Robert hunkered down and used his finger to draw a picture on the ultimate canvas, the Earth. He drew the North American and African continents and the ocean separating them. Robert pointed to Florida.

The African looked confused.

He wanted to know: How many days' walk?

Robert, the Highwayman who had come so far, in so many ways, looked the man in the eye.

Robert didn't know how he could possibly explain.