Psychoanalyst Carl Jung, back near the beginning of the last century, became fascinated with the repetition of certain—often highly symbolic—images across many cultures, even those divided by geography and history. He theorized that these repeated motifs—what he called archetypes—were reflections of a broader, shared human experience that runs deep into our evolutionary past, a "collective unconscious" formed by generations of communal experience.

Richard Butler, Brother With Cross

These archetypal images seem invested with tremendous power, and Jung's theories seem to provide a convincing explanation for it. Even in our media-saturated age, there can sometimes seem to be something deeper, an almost unnameable power, to be found in certain iconic images. When that happens, it strikes me as nothing short of miraculous.

Most recently, this deep, almost preverbal response hit me as I looked at a number of recent paintings by Richard Butler, whose one-person show opens at Van Brunt Gallery in Beacon this month. Essentially a portraitist, Butler works with one of the most fundamental icons of all time—the human form.

Lead singer of the Psychedelic Furs, Butler is hardly the first musician to turn his attention to painting. But unlike a few others I can think of, it's much more than just a sideline or a dilettantish hobby for him. Before starting the band, he had attended Epsom Art School, south of London, where he received solid (if unexceptional) training in painting and drawing. His music career eclipsed the visual arts for him for some time, until he returned to painting about 10 years ago.

His portraits are anything but conventional. His process involves working with photographs of his sitters—all people he knows well, like his daughter, his brother, and his friends—which he cuts and pastes in Photoshop. He combines different views, and skews the scale of various elements (the heads all seem to shrink in proportion to the body, lately) to produce what is essentially a preparatory sketch for the painting. He then transfers the contours of the sketch to his canvas by a grid system, and, as he says, "that's when the painting begins."

Jean Campbell, Detail of Reality

The distorted figures and faces often bear fanciful attributes, such as a sumo wig or large cross hanging from a necklace of oversized black beads; a recent series obscures the face altogether in favor of an almost sinister, inky, form-fitting mask, festooned with something like Mickey Mouse ears. Often set into bleak landscapes, the ultimate effect is one part love, two parts alienation, lending a haunted, melancholic air to the final product.

Of course, these same qualities will be familiar to anyone who's listened to Butler's music over the years. Likening the writing process to making a painting, he notes, "They both come from the same place. When you write lyrics, it just comes to you—you get down a stream of feelings and ideas, and then afterwards you realize what you've been trying to say, and you sit down and refine it." The paintings follow the same pattern. Even with their initial computer-based sketches, "it has to be paint at the end of the day," and he's exceedingly sensitive to the manifestation of the material on the canvas.

Working in the rich medium of oil, the paintings range in size from medium-large to enormous. (The biggest canvases are more than six feet tall.) Nothing quite prepares you for the powerful presence of the oversized images. Butler's very restrained, almost monochromatic palette paradoxically calls attention to the subtle tints and touches of color that are introduced, just as the overall flatness in his application of the paint counterbalances his deft, painterly touch with the brush. Such restraint (no impasto, no over-the-top emotion) charges the figures with tremendous tension, a balancing act that he ensures by spending a lot of time with the paintings. When he thinks they're nearly finished, he brings them from the studio to his home, where he can observe, in real time, what works and what doesn't. The intuitive, inductive nature of the process—and the lingering memory of the paintings, which have continued to grow on me since I saw them—tap into that subconscious level of meaning that so fascinated Jung.

It's hardly a mistake that the simple, frontal presentation of the human form became a significant mode for religious art, the icon. Another painter of the iconic figure, Jean Campbell, is showing a series of new paintings at the recently opened Silent Space in Kingston, across the street from UPAC.