Over the course of Hervé Tullet: Shape and Color, six local artists, including Tricia Butski, will be in residence at Albright-Knox Northland creating murals that will later be installed in public locations. To celebrate these artists, we are spotlighting each one of them to talk about their practice and the ideas behind their work.

Tricia Butski grew up in typical Niagara Falls fashion, meaning you have a tiny house with a big yard, an ice cream shop down the street, and, Tricia says, “You have to have a job working in the state park at some point in your life.” She worked as a Kodak photographer and learned how to drive a bus while describing the natural wonders of the Falls.

“My honest first artistic inspiration was Bob Ross,” Tricia says. She came from a creative family, and with her father would sit absorbed in Ross’s iconic The Joy of Painting. Tricia always enjoyed drawing things, but she didn’t start taking art seriously until she was about 16.

Tricia’s high school was small enough that it didn’t have a large art program: one art teacher and one art room. But the art teacher—Mrs. Katz—noticed her growing interest and did everything she could to nurture it. She made up classes for Tricia to take, offered independent studies, and even bought art supplies out of her own pocket. At a time when Tricia wasn’t totally confident in her abilities, it was Mrs. Katz and her parents who gave her the encouragement she needed to pursue a degree in art. “I just had some good adults in my life that kept pushing me,” she says.

Through undergrad at various colleges, Tricia learned the fundamentals, working in a realist style that didn’t yet satisfy her. “I wanted to push it more,” she says, “but at the time I didn’t know how yet.”

Tricia describes graduate school as a long period of frustration, of trial and error, of making work she wasn’t happy with, getting desperate and trying new things. At the same time, she had begun to think about how to make work about memory distortion.

“When I was growing up, we were really close to my grandmother. She was a part of our life every single day,” Tricia says.

Eventually, Tricia’s grandmother developed Lewy Body Dementia. The Alzheimer’s Association describes Lewy Body as “a type of progressive dementia that leads to a decline in thinking, reasoning, and independent function” thought to be caused by a similar underlying issue that causes Parkinson’s. Tricia says, “She would have different hallucinations. Memories that she would have from fifty years ago would come back and seem real to her.”

This can be scary, not only to the person with the disease, but to friends and loved ones as well. Tricia says, “When somebody is going through something like that, you can’t say, ‘No, you’re wrong,’ or, ‘No, that’s not happening.’ You just kind of have to adapt and be a part of it and just make sure you keep them safe.”

It had a profound impact on Tricia, as she and her family adapted to the way her grandmother’s mind was changing and how her memory now functioned. They had to figure out how to be a part of her life as it was now. She says, “This new reality she was experiencing became part of our reality.”