Railroad artist has fan’s back
Back in the ’90s, Derek Guy and his friends would hang out in train yards and study the graffiti on the sides of the parked trains, which were like colorful, exotic, rolling art galleries. The work of one artist in particular stood out to Guy. They were line drawings in profile of a bearded man in a cowboy hat smoking a pipe and accompanied with cryptic, enigmatic phrases like “Audience expands” and “Never came back.”
The images were made by Russell Butler, the Gurdon-based Missouri Pacific Railroad worker and artist also known as Colossus of Roads, Gypsy Sphinx and buZ blurr, who died Jan. 26 at age 80.
“It was an incredibly cool, stylized moniker,” said Guy, a California-based menswear writer and creator of dieworkwear.com. “[Butler] was incredibly, incredibly prolific. And there were these stories about how he also worked in the railroad system. It made him this really compelling figure … he was basically a hero in this very niche community.”
In 2015, Guy was posting on a menswear message board when he discovered that a fellow board contributor was Butler’s nephew.
“I told him, dude, your uncle was my childhood hero,” Guy told me last week. “Would it be possible for you to get me in touch with him?”
Guy wrote Butler a letter and asked if the artist would sign his Schott Perfecto black leather jacket. Butler agreed if Guy would buy one of his handmade books, “Hoo Hoo Hobos Fortuitous Logos.”
He sent Butler some money for the book along with his jacket, on the back of which Butler drew in white streak marker his cowboy moniker and the words “Fragments of Contumacy.”
When he got the jacket back “the first thing I did was look up ‘contumacy,’” Guy said (it means “stubborn refusal to obey or comply with authority, especially a court order or summons”).
Turns out the phrase was rather apt.
“That’s what I relate to that time of my life,” he says of the years spent exploring train yards as a kid.
Guy wears the jacket about twice a month and occasionally gets comments on it, he said.
He was recently asked by Esquire magazine to write a brief piece — a little over 300 words — on a special item from his wardrobe. “How an Elusive Graffiti Writer’s Work Wound Up on My Leather Jacket,” was posted at esquire.com on April 2. It’s a thoughtful meditation of how an article of clothing is a connection to his youth.
“What I really wanted to write was 1,500 words or more,” he said. “[Butler] wasn’t just a guy who scribbled on train cars, he was part of this whole counter-cultural art scene and the emotions that it stirred in me as a restless kid … going into train yards and being with friends you are bound to through these experiences. It gave me a sense of belonging.”