Paint By Numbers
How a little financial knowledge can save artists from the garret
BY Chandra Bulucon
Photography by Lisa Kannakko
Who says artists have to starve? And who says they can’t own stocks, register their savings and travel the world with sketch box in tow?
Jack Butler doesn’t. Butler is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary, international artist who also happens to be a financial advisor for Primerica Financial Services, a subsidiary of the US giant Citigroup. He believes that his two professions can converge, co-exist and coalesce. And more than that, he says, one is essential to the success of the other.
Seven years ago, however, that wasn’t so obvious.
The Pittsburgh-born Butler turned to art as a child after flunking out of second grade because he couldn’t read. Fantasy and drawing became his focus and, by age 14, he had his first solo show. At 16, he was doing medical drawings in the autopsy room of Pittsburgh’s South Side Hospital. At 18, he donated a collection of his paintings to the city’s Carnegie Museum. By then, he had realized that art was his calling. “It is the foundational language of my life,” he says. “It is my way of being and my way of knowing. The Inuit word Sananguagaq [which means one who builds models of how the world works] sums it up better than the word ‘art.’”
He went on to work for 30 years building medical models, teaching and travelling the world to exhibit his installations, videos and performance pieces. But he never made much money doing it. Opportunities to exhibit increased steadily, but his income did not. So he decided to learn about the business of making and saving money.
In 1998, he turned to Primerica. At first, he says, he was uncertain about forming a relationship with a multimillion-dollar company, but the more he learned about the way the economy works, the more he wanted to help other artists learn too. But his art remains his primary goal.
“[Financial planning is] a means to an end.” he says. “I earn money so that I can make art—make art here, in this place, and now.”
