The York Butler Fund was created in answer to
a prayer of how to help my brother who was
struggling with advanced third stage lung cancer. Feeling helpless, I Asked; what can I do, how can I help?
Staring into no where, I had an inspiration, more of a command, to pick up a Sharpie pen. I don’t draw people, but what came were these characters with things to say. I called them Birds of a Feather. I drew as commanded and then raced to my home studio and started watercoloring these first starts. Soon after a friend and neighbor drove into my driveway, he normally stops by while walking the dog. Dan walked into the studio and asked “what are you doing”? I told him of this inspiration, and idea that followed, to offer an original to those who wished to make a donation to help defray York’s horrific medical bills. I asked him what he thought
of a $25 donation for a small original Bird. Without hesitation, Dan said, I’ll take two, reached into his pocket and handed me $50. We cried and he started painting with me. Moments after he left, it occurred to me that Dan was a priest. Could the message have been any clearer?
I introduced the Birds of a Feather at an open studio event, September 2006. Artists and friends joined in on these early drawings. I became obsessed with these drawings and couldn’t stop the flow, nor did I want to. For four months, I drew every morning and watercolored late into the night. Some days the Birds flew out at 40 an hour. This kind of creative madness stayed at peak for four months at which time I stopped to count and there were 2,483 of them. We soon had donations of over $10.000. The Birds had locally become the “gift to give for Christmas 2006.”
The real gift of this project was a yet deeper bonding between brother and sister. York would come to my studio and we would laugh and wonder who these people were. Clearly, as people
made their choices to buy, you could see how they
