Mobile painter combines love of art with ministry

Laughter flows through Allan Butt’s conversations almost as smoothly as the paint from his paintbrush. And why not? The Mobile Baptist has joy in life, what Christ once referred to as “life abundantly.” 
   
“I’m an artist,” he said, laughing. “I just go with it.” 
   
Butt, a Mobile native and current resident, is an artist and a minister, a painter and a musician, a husband and a father. He and his wife, Felicia, have 10 children.
   
He’s made a local, national and even international name for himself. In addition to having his work displayed in his hometown and overseas, Butt served as president of The Mobile Watercolor and Graphic Arts Society in 1999, 2000 and 2001. 
   
Also in 2001, he was named as one of Mobile’s Top 25 Most Influential Artists and Art Supporters by Mobile Bay Monthly magazine.   
   
But his gifts and talents could not always be framed. 
   
There are people in Haiti who were once affected not by his art but by his heart — folks who cared nothing of color and form save for brighter futures for their children. 
   
“I went on a couple of missions trips and felt the Lord directing me to move down there with my wife and two small boys,” Butt said.
   
He did move, partially supported by the missions program of his church, Cottage Hill Baptist, Mobile, in Mobile Baptist Association. 
   
For 13 months in 1981 and 1982, the island of Haiti was his canvas. Acrylics and oil were discarded for more pressing mediums such as food and medicine. 
   
It was on the missions field that Butt first realized God may have intended his hands for something more. 
   
“I had been painting a little bit, but I met a missionary from New York down there who was an amateur photographer. I took a black-and-white photo he had done and painted it in watercolor the way I thought it might look in color,” Butt said.
   
“When I showed it to him, his mouth fell open. He said, ‘Allan, you have missed your calling. … You need to be back in the United States doing art.’”
   
This advice, combined with his wife’s pregnancy, prompted the family to move home to Alabama. Butt, already an ordained minister, took the opportunity to finish his education, graduating in 1985 from the University of Mobile with a double major in art and psychology.  
   
“Charles ‘Mack’ Clark (now dean of the university’s college of arts and sciences) greatly encouraged me and gave me the moral support I needed to really pursue art,” Butt said. “I remember an English professor telling him, ‘He can’t be an artist and a minister,’ to which he exclaimed, ‘Of course, he can.’”
   
Butt was a little different from most students right from the start, Clark said. 
   
“He was a little bit more mature than most, even when he was here as a student, and he worked extremely hard. He’s one of the top five artists we’ve graduated, in my opinion,” he said. “I’ve been here 30 years, and I’d put him right up there at the top. I think he’ll really go places.”
   
Butt said he was thankful for Clark’s encouragement while he was developing as an artist, as that English professor wasn’t the only one to question his mixing spirituality and art. 
   
A friend once vocalized his qualms about spirituality and art meeting while watching Butt paint a flower.
   
“He asked, ‘What’s so spiritual about that?’ He was like, ‘You’re a Christian and you’re an artist, so you’re supposed to be painting pictures of Jesus’ — and he was dead serious,” Butt said, laughing. “It was like if it wasn’t Jesus, it wasn’t spiritual.” 
   
It was during this brief exchange that he first noticed the degree to which the Christian conception of art has been blurred. 
   
“I don’t think my friend knew what he was saying. It just kind of came out, but that is the majority’s view of the world — that the world is a dichotomy,” Butt said. 
   
Christians weren’t the only ones painting him with the brush of dualism. 
   
He also found himself contending with stereotypes from fellow artists, forgetting “Reverend” was still printed in front of his name on personal checks he wrote to various local art societies for membership dues.
   
But he did his best to break those stereotypes down. “Over the years, I gained a lot of respect from people who, I think, at first didn’t like me because I think they knew I was a preacher,” Butt said. 
   
“In their minds, artist and preacher — the two shall never mix. But I was doing things that were good, but at the same time, everybody knew I was a Christian,” he said. “If Christians aren’t out there making art and making good art, you’re going to get all these people who are perverting the arts and taking them down.”
   
He continues to paint, make music and make himself available for conference speaking. 
   
Butt has a country-rock record scheduled for release early this year — uncharted territory for the trivocational renaissance man of God.  
   
His work can be seen online at www.allanbutt.com.