There is a lot of superb contemporary realism being made these days; this article by Allison Malafronte shines light on a gifted individual.
There is a contingent of contemporary landscape painters whose works could easily be mistaken for those of 19th-century Russia’s renowned “Itinerants,” but Viktor Butko (b. 1978)’s educational lineage can literally be traced back to one of that movement’s leaders, Isaac Levitan (1860–1900).
Growing up in Moscow, Butko was deeply influenced by his grandfather Victor Chulovich, a famous painter whose teacher was a student of Levitan. After studying at the Moscow Art School, Butko trained at the Akademicheskaya Dacha, a summer school named after another Itinerant, Ilya Repin (1844–1930), who helped create that educational venue as an extension of the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg.
Butko got his introduction to American art and artists in 2002, when he began exhibiting with Thomas Kearns McCarthey Gallery in Salt Lake City. Eleven years later, he became involved with an invitational of American landscapists working at Plyos, a town in Russia’s Ivanovo region where Levitan painted some of his most celebrated works. Then Butko had a chance to experience America’s East Coast landscape and art scene when the invitation was reciprocated in 2016; he traveled to Long Island and Maine to paint with several of those same landscapists.
This cultural exchange, organized by artist Ben Fenske and Grenning Gallery (Sag Harbor), helped connect Butko not only to like-minded plein air artists but also to America’s own landscape painting history.
Butko has since relocated to Boston, where he lives and paints with his wife, fellow artist Kelly Carmody. He also spends several months each year living on Shelter Island and exploring Long Island’s East End, where he is known for lyrical interpretations of the local landscape. The work illustrated here, “Cloudy Sunset at Dering Harbor,” is one such painting that Butko completed on Shelter Island in 2021 — a simple scene brought to impressionistic life through his ability to capture the colorful, golden glow of sunset.
“I was impressed by the red sun setting in the clouds and the subtle color of the water,” the artist recalls. “When someone sailed in on a boat and left it on the shore, I decided that the image had taken shape, and I had to paint it.”
