Artist Statement

Years ago, while at a party, and sitting on the couch in a crowded living room, I recall feeling very much alone. And bored. There was an old Etch A Sketch on the steamer trunk that served as a coffee table. And then I heard someone say — “You know, you just can’t draw a person on an Etch A Sketch.”

It sounded like a challenge so I picked up the frame and started noodling with it. I hadn’t touched an Etch A Sketch since I was a kid, and even then I’d much preferred a  sketch pad and pens, but my hands manipulated the knobs without thinking. Starting with an eye, I drew the face outwards, then connected a strand of hair to the eyebrow. I discovered I could make the stylus travel anywhere on her body by looping back through the loose curls that cascaded over her shoulders.

I hadn’t even noticed the crowd watching me until I was done. It was long before the days of cell phones, so I have no evidence of my first Etch. Later, I took pictures with a camera before erasing them. But a few, I couldn’t bear to lose, so over the years I collected more and more Etch A Sketch frames, to make new drawings even giving them to friends, advising them to treat the sketch like blown glass (i.e., don’t let it fall on its face). In recent years, I’ve joined a community of other Etch A Sketch artists, who constantly astound me, and who taught me how to preserve my drawings. I haven’t done it yet. Something in me loves the Zen quality of drawing and the impermanence of the art (and something in me is too lazy to buy a respirator to do it properly). Now I know, you can draw anything on an Etch A Sketch. The trick is to relax, and go with the flow.

Artist Biography

Deborah Sale-Butler has been a morning radio show host, stand-up comic, improviser, animation voice actor, and a speech/dialects teacher in professional training programs across the country including The Second City Training Center, The American Academy of Dramatic Arts (Hollywood) and Stella Adler (Hollywood). She now writes full-time in Portland Oregon.

Her stories have appeared in numerous publications including The Artisinal Writer, Etymology Magazine, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Amazing Stories, as well as the anthologies Dead Girls Walking and Three X the Fun.

You can find links to all of her published work at https://deborah-sale-butler.com.