Artist Spotlight: buttercup
buttercup (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Hyattsville, Maryland, USA with a particular focus in illustration, sequential art, and 2D animation. They work to compose hand-drawn, digital depictions of fantastic, familiar moments of Afrodiasporic and indigenous life with an attention to queer and gender nonconforming identity. They are the author of ‘UM’: a magical girl comic about Eugenée, a black, non-binary, aspiring birth-worker who finds themself mixed up in a millennia-old conflict between the powers that be, and a faction of cosmic, shamanic midwives.
Content warning: depiction of birth
buttercup identifies as an ‘artist/autist’. We reached out to them following their contributions to the #30daysofautisticart thread on Twitter to discuss clinical diagnosis, global healing, and what inspires their creative compulsions.
Photo credit: buttercup
What attracted you to the #30daysofautisticart thread?
I got involved in #30daysofautisticart through the creator and organizer of the hashtag, Victoria Jackman (she/they), a regular participant in my art livestreams on the platform Twitch. It was their enthusiasm and compassion that drew me to participating in the hashtag. I wanted to signal boost the work she’s been doing for autistic advocacy and take part in what ended up being a really fun exploration and expression, in my view, of how autistic people engage with creative endeavors.
You refer to yourself as an ‘artist/autist’ in your Twitter bio. What does this mean to you?
An ‘autist’ is a person with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and I’m an artist. More than anything I thought ‘autist/artist’ was a fun play on words.
Sometime around the late ‘00s I had begun to suspect I might be autistic because of the recurring social difficulties I had faced growing up, and as time went on, the ways I think and engage with the world—and how extremely they differ from how the majority of people around me seem to—has left me more and more certain my way of seeing the world is neuroatypical. A combination of debilitating social anxiety, restricted interests, and overstimulating sensory issues have kept me mostly confined to my parents house for most of the past decade, and I don’t foresee that changing anytime soon, given a lack of financial support.
We spoke briefly about honouring the difference between those with a formal diagnosis of autism, versus those who are subclinical, or awaiting professional diagnoses. Why are these distinctions important?
A not-insignificant portion of the community of autistic adults globally are subclinical or self-diagnosed. I’m incapable of speaking for all subclinical autistic people, much less all neurodiverse people. In my own experience (and according to my friends who do have ASD diagnoses), the discriminatory practices, social stigma, and abusive conditioning techniques sometimes employed against autistic people can cause even more stress and trauma than diagnosis is worth. Especially when families and governments are disinterested in providing meaningful support to people for those whom most typical forms of labor are impossible even after formal diagnosis.
Diagnosis doesn’t always significantly change the social realities for autistic adults. That—paired with the reality that, in the United States, it could cost thousands of dollars and years of tests to get formally diagnosed—can render the diagnostic process undesirable.
All that being said, being subclinical doesn’t negate the very real social and sensory difficulties, not to mention numerous possible comorbidities, that often grow worse with age for autistic people. Due to all of these factors, many formally diagnosed members of the neurodivergent community openly accept and info-share with self-diagnosed autistic people.
Photo credit: buttercup
You’ve discussed the difficulties with getting a formal diagnosis. Could you describe your own process in coming to identify as neurodivergent?
Even if I had gotten a diagnosis as a child or young adult, it’s likely I would have been classified as high-functioning and been encouraged to try and live normally while masking. So when my executive and social dysfunction became unmanageable without assistance in 2016, I sought out talk therapy. My therapist suggested that rather than seek a diagnosis, it might be more productive for us to work through my social and sensory issues as they arise, in no small part because the political situation regarding black, gender nonconforming, and disabled people was uncertain under the newly elected conservative United States government. Thus far the approach we’ve been using has been very effective for me and especially for my art practice.
Regardless, embracing my identity as neurodivergent, even without a diagnosis, has helped me to explain myself to others. I think it’s important for people who suspect they might be autistic to have access to non-discriminatory, patient-focused, and medically rigorous diagnostic and support resources. But given the systemically racist, sexist, and ableist environment many formally diagnosed autistic people have difficulty navigating getting those needs met.
Can you tell myself and the readers what ‘Seqart’ is and about your work on and inspiration for UM?
‘Seqart’ is a shorthand portmanteau for ‘sequential art’, which is a fancy way of saying ‘illustrating for comics’.
I began work on UM in late 2013 in response to and as a grieving mechanism to help cope with the death of an ex-partner. Informed by the social and political discourse of the time, the project eventually warped into a science-fantasy story about meaning-making and deep time, with birthwork, political revolution, and life-affirmation as its core themes.
I have yet to see a serious science fiction or fantasy work with a darkskin, black protagonist, and there is very little trans or nonbinary representation in media to date, so it seemed imperative to me that Eugenée be the perspective through which we experience the story.
I haven’t been able to dedicate significant time to the project in recent months. I hope to return to it soon, and to support me and the project you can visit patreon.com/btrcp.
Photo credit: buttercup
Will you tell us a bit about how your creative process begins and ends?
A lot of my creative compulsions are reactionary: I often consume media that feels affecting in certain ways, and deeply remiss in others, which causes me to want to see stories with the character types, storytelling devices, physics or magic I felt were absent or could have been handled with more nuance. A lot of the things I make are made to fill that gap. I get most of my in-the-moment creative energy from social interaction and from conversations with friends and colleagues about the nature of our craft as artists.
As for when my creative process ends, I don’t think a piece is ever truly finished. I have a sort of equation I do in my head that helps me to decide to stop working, though sometimes it’s just a matter of fatigue. I often begin winding down or applying digital image enhancements at this phase and try to get feedback from my peers as to whether or not the piece feels ‘cohesive’.
Photo credit: buttercup
When did you first know you wanted to be a creator, and what were your inspirations growing up?
I don’t think I’ve ever known anything else. My earliest memories are of drawing, singing, telling fantastic stories, and making original characters based almost entirely around bad puns. My father is a career musician and technology enthusiast, and my mother is a linguist, botanist, potter, and craftsperson. Literally all of my siblings and cousins work in the arts in some capacity. I don’t know what else I could do.
My inspirations growing up were pretty much anything I encountered remotely related to anime. There was something qualitatively distinct about animation and illustration conventions in Japan at the time that I was able to detect and wanted to emulate, and that sometimes carried over into western animation.
Once I got to high school I was really into fantasy literature, as well as both western and eastern comics. It was around that time that I began trying to craft tolkeinesque self-contained fantasy worlds and simultaneously realized there were a lot more black, brown, and gender nonconforming people in my daily life than were depicted in these stories. I slowly began to gravitate toward focusing on showing people of varied backgrounds in worlds with similar textures to the ones I saw in the books and comics I read.
Photo credit: buttercup
What role do you think art plays in public and global healing?
I typically think of every instance of human interaction with the cosmos as definitively an instance of ‘doing art’.
However, assuming you’re referring to ‘the arts’, I think that it’s possible to alter the role of visual art to enable an artistic and linguistic texture that normalizes and valorizes marginal identities and interpersonal vulnerability. Doing so could also encourage people to engage with our shared body of knowledge in good faith. In that way, art’s role in public and global healing is paramount. However, I feel we as a species have a long way to go before art can effectively shift toward a revolutionary or mutually transformative affect.
Do you have any words of wisdom for budding creatives reading this?
Like anyone, creatives need to be physically and mentally well enough to enable themselves to meaningfully help others. That includes the forms of help that involve spending their vital energy to work on their craft. Sometimes the people closest to creatives shame us for seeking help because the communicative power of symbols and images is often obstructed by capitalist interest: If your labor is immaterial, why do you deserve to eat?
But, generally, people are willing to and want to see creatives thrive and are astonished by what forms, textures, and harmonies we are able to shape reality into, so it’s often better in the longterm to be vulnerable and ask for help than it is to stew in self-loathing or mental and physical anguish.
And lastly, what future projects are you currently working on or dreaming of?
I have upcoming sequential artwork in collaboration with writer Jamila Rowser via Radiator Comics’ Spiny Orb Weaver arts journal, available late May 2021. I also have unannounced freelance and commission work that will be coming out throughout the second half of 2021. I hope to make enough money by July 2021 to refocus my energy on UM and its various spin-offs.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You can find links to buttercup’s art and social media here: http://linktr.ee/btrcp