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Photo by Jim Craven Artist Bruce Butte stands in an ivy-covered doorway at his Jacksonville home. One of his paintings was selected for the 1999 Britt Festivals poster. Britt poster work chosen Bruce Butte's painting is this year's symbol By BILL VARBLE When they asked Bruce Butte to create a poster for this year's Peter Britt Festivals, the 79-year-old artist completed three original paintings, no less. He declared them ready to be seen, and a committee of nine Britt staffers and board members went out to Butte's Jacksonville studio. "You people can choose one," Butte said, and retired to his home next door. "If you don't like any, I'm in trouble." They pondered -- and picked the one Butte liked best all along. "The three paintings were very different," Britt staffer Arthur Waitt remembers. "The one we chose was whimsical, bright and very different from what we've done in the past." This year's poster was unveiled Tuesday afternoon at the Britt Pavilion in Jacksonville. It shows a band of elves jamming on musical instruments. "They said it was different," Butte says. "It has a fairy-like thing." In a full life, a constant for Butte has been art. Born in Seattle in 1920, he entered the University of Washington in 1938 but soon switched to the Edison Vocational School in Art. He promptly won a Seattle Art Museum prize and was soon doing commercial illustration and design while showing paintings at the Seattle Art Museum. When the United States entered World War II, he designed camouflage for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Boeing. "We hung these big nets over buildings on poles and changed their pattern," he says. "Two or three planes got lost and had to radio and find out where the field was. We even stretched them over the river on some barges." Butte saw combat with the Corps, taking part in the second wave of the invasion of Okinawa and helping capture an airfield there. He returned to Seattle after the war and worked as an art director there and in Hawaii and San Francisco. He opened a design firm, Butte, Herrero & Hyde, in 1951 on Montgomery Street in San Francisco. Famed lawyer Melvin Belli was one floor down. "I always expected a bomb to lift the roof," Butte says. "He'd invite us to parties. He was a big, bombastic guy." Butte was art director for Chevrolet on the West Coast, hired by Chevy's ad agency. He became a member of the Bohemian Club, a highly exclusive club for men who have made it. "You had to have a lot of talent or a lot of money," he says. Which did he have? "I don't know, I had a good friend." He met presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush in the club, but not when either was president. "We have a good time," he says. "Concerts, plays." Butte taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, sailed on San Francisco Bay and built a beach house in Bodega Bay. With his wife, Ann, he designed advertising and books. The couple moved to Jacksonville in 1970. "Annie and I had kicked around the idea of moving out in the sticks somewhere," he says. He was Harry and David's art director for 10 years. In 1988 he was ordained an Episcopal priest after studying with a traditional Episcopal theological seminary, St. Joseph of Arimathea, in Berkeley, Calif. "I've done a few weddings," he says. In recent years he's taught art, had exhibits in San Francisco and Portland and taken trips that result in new paintings. His work hangs in the Jacksonville Inn, the Rogue Valley Manor and Rogue Valley Medical Center. Butte's studio is next door to his home, which is on the National Register of Historic Places. In one room hang oils, in another, watercolors. Another is for classes. "We were going to make this the art center of the universe," he says with a small laugh. He says he advises young artists against art as a career -- unless they're very serious. "There's 10 billion starving ones," he says. "It's got to be in you." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA