Picture preview: Butch Anthony's Intertwangleism

Folk artist Butch Anthony started making art when his friend John Henry Toney ploughed up a turnip that looked like it had a face in it.

Butch suggested that John Toney make a picture of it which he then took to a local junk shop and sold for $50. As Butch tells it "I thought hell, if he can do it I’ll make one too. I made a picture, stuck it in the junk store, put $50 on it. Next day someone came along and bought it. I’ve been painting ever since."

The Alabama-based self-styled "artist, builder and picker of things", and creator of the annual ‘Doo Nanny’ festival, has been hailed a ‘national treasure’ stateside with his indefinable – yet in-demand – artworks. His humorous, clever and strangely beautiful paintings coupled with his unique brand of ramshackle genius have gained him a cult following in the US.

Click here or on "View Images" for a picture preview

Butch explains: "Intertwangleism is how I look at people and break them down to their primordial beginnings. Almost like x-ray vision, seeing through a persons clothes, through their skin, and muscles and veins and bones even their shadow. These first skeletonized paintings are just the first phase of my Theory to take over the art world as we know it."

Intertwangleism’s art-works are at once humorous, morbid, childlike and yet strangely sobering, Butch constantly questions the boundaries of art, existence, time and respectability- all whilst wearing Liberty dungarees. Never has ‘mixed-media’ been so mixed.

His first ever UK show opens at Black Rat Projects, London Soho, on Friday.

Until 22 February, www.blackratprojects.com