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Like the pictures she paints, artist Jules Burt is vibrant, flamboyant and seemingly fearless. She appreciates the importance of a well-chosen accessory and a few good friends.
By LENNIE BENNETT
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 13, 2002
PLANT CITY -- Sometimes, you have to make friends to make friends. Jules Burt understands.
On March 29, 1992, Burt, a Plant City native, sat alone in Atlanta. It was her 30th birthday.
"I didn't know anybody," she recalls, "so I said I'll make some friends."
She bought paper and paint at a craft store. She let the lines and colors flow. The "ladies," as she called the characters she created, were like her: brash and funny, women who met the world straight on, always in red lipstick and flamboyant accessories.
She hung them in the storefront space she'd rented. Thirty minutes later, a couple bought both paintings for $100 each.
She says it was the first time she'd ever painted.
Today she's still painting, and her ladies can be seen in the company of some very important people, including Rachel, Monica, Phoebe, Ross, Chandler and Joey.
You know, Friends.
Jules Burt grew up in Plant City. Her father, R.G., was principal of Turkey Creek High School and her mother, Jeanie, taught P.E. at Plant City High. Her father died four years ago; her mother, three older sisters and a brother still live in the area. They were a musical family but not especially keyed in to the visual arts.
"I did arts and crafts growing up, and I took an art class in seventh grade. We used pastels, and I won a prize at the Strawberry Festival. That's it."
Between graduating from high school and that seminal birthday moment in Atlanta, Burt waited tables, attended Hillsborough Community College and lived in Mexico, a place she loves. She returned to Plant City and sold jewelry she imported from Mexico in local hair salons. An acquaintance was going to Atlanta and Burt, thinking she could sell more jewelry there, followed. She shared storefront space in the Virginia Highlands neighborhood with a barber shop.
After the first paintings sold, Burt figured she might be on to something and bought more art supplies. She traded jewelry for frames. She gave the ladies names, filling the shop with Chatty Caddies, Chicks and Salsa, Hollywood Hairdos, Sassy Sistas, Gossiping Gardeners, Drama Queens and Dancing Divas.
People began showing up, stepping over the elderly men in barber chairs to get to the ladies.
She painted them on pillows and oversized refrigerator magnets. She started a new series called Fun Flowers as a Valentine's Day gift for a client. Her work was sold in a gallery in the prestigious Buckhead area. Elton John acquired a collection of the magnets. Uma Thurman got a pillow.
Then, a big break. A television network executive bought one of her paintings and hung it in his office in Los Angeles. Someone in product placement saw it and, says Burt, thought it had the right "punch" for the set of one of several shows she oversaw -- perhaps Suddenly Susan or Veronica's Closet. Or Friends.
Burt shipped six of her "queens," a Fun Flowers, a large painting titled Eight Cups of Coffee, plus coffee mugs she decorated with big polka dots, the refrigerator magnets and funky switch plates she had begun to manufacture.
They landed on Friends in 1996 and can still be seen in rotation in the girls' apartment and Central Perk, the coffeehouse where the group congregates.
Her business in Atlanta had taken off. She was featured in local newspapers and magazines, and Katie Couric interviewed her during the 1996 Olympics there. National magazines such as Better Homes and Gardens came calling. She added a line of hand-painted home accessories and furniture. She was a popular fixture on the Atlanta art scene, doing designer showhouse rooms and donating her work to local charities.
She was fast-dancing, she says now. Too fast.
"I'm a country person. I wanted to be near my family."
A seven-year marriage had ended in divorce and negotiations with Home Shopping Network to license and mass-produce her products fell through. She closed up shop in Atlanta and moved back home earlier this year, buying a house 10 minutes from her mother and sisters.
She still makes the switch plates, magnets and a few other bibelots, but mostly, "I'm concentrating on my painting. There's so much pressure gone now from not having a gallery to run."
One of her bedrooms is a studio, and leaning against the walls are ladies in various stages of refinement.
"I paint them naked," she says, "and then dress and redress them. My work is very light-hearted."
Jules Burt's art is neither complex nor thought-provoking. Stylized, simplified forms, bright colors artfully mixed and backgrounds that provide visual clues about the subjects are its hallmarks, much like Pop Art.
But her work owes more to, and can be better appreciated within the context of, Folk Art. In fact, Burt has an impressive collection of Folk Art from widely known practitioners such as the late Howard Finster.
Like many folk artists -- the Highwaymen are good examples -- Burt works rapidly, to the point of mass-producing her paintings. She has refined her style over the decade but hasn't changed it, and her subject matter is repetitive. She is indifferent to trends and currents in the art world. She sees her paintings as "something to make people happy."
What makes her work unique is her ability to assimilate her personality so seamlessly without it being self-portraiture. She is the invisible member of every group she paints, the one just out of range telling her fellow divas to hold the pose or the queens to straighten their crowns. Her characters are wordly and take themselves seriously, like the women on Sex and the City, and are as deeply interested in appearances, but unlike Carrie et al., they have no depths to plumb. They may have been around the block a few times, but in all their surface brightness, they are as devoid of irony as Burt.
"A lot of people think they are based on me," Burt says. "I was the baby sister. My older sisters loved makeup, and I was the victim of one too many makeovers, I guess. I love to wear wigs, dress up."
Her closet is packed with platform shoes she has sequined and glittered, handbags she has loaded down with beads. In her bathroom is an old domed hair dryer, complete with magazine light, that she has covered with colored stones. She has an encyclopedic makeup collection that she sometimes uses instead of paint.
She says that as much as she likes men, she never paints them.
"It traumatizes me," she says. "Men are boring when it comes to accessories. My art's about accessories and my ladies."
Vance Hamilton, Burt's best friend and major-domo, arrives at her house on most weekday mornings. They grew up together, and like Burt, Hamilton is part of a large Plant City family. He joined her in Mexico and Atlanta, and now he's back in Plant City. He is a computer consultant and is updating her Web site (www.julesjewels.com), hauls paintings and helps with practical things like shipping.
"Jules always has ideas," he says. "She's always thinking of new things."
They were unwinding from a full weekend at the Las Olas Art Festival in Ft. Lauderdale, where she sold a number of her ladies and Fun Flowers. At Burt's behest, Hamilton had purchased a lime green naugahyde sofa from Salvation Army and hauled it to the festival to decorate her booth. She thinks she'll use it again at the Old Hyde Park Village Art Festival in Tampa in October, along with one of her jewel-encrusted chandeliers.
Her folksiness and never-met-a-stranger approach to people camouflage her drive and competitiveness.
"I've had a lot of people download my work trying to knock it off," she says. "But they can't get the personality, the colors, the names."
Her work is still shown in an Atlanta gallery and can be purchased from her Web site, but she seems content for the moment focusing on outdoor shows and commissions. Women clamor for their portraits -- she's about to begin one of the University of Georgia cheerleaders -- though the individual is always rendered as one of her ladies, the only distinguishing features being hair and eye color and accessories.
She is talking to a Japanese company about a line of plush figures and would entertain offers from other companies.
"The right deal will come along," she says. "You just have to be careful when you start to get big."
She paints almost every day, breaking only to watch two favorite soaps, The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful.
She still charges modestly for her paintings. Small ones are $175; larger ones cost up to $3,500. The paintings used on the Friends set belong to her, and she figures she can charge more for them when they're returned to her. The volume of her sales makes her self-supporting, she says.
Burt has no children but is devoted to her three nieces and one nephew.
"I'm always dressing my nieces up," she says. "We go shopping. Watch movies."
When she socializes, it's with her family or longtime friends in Plant City. She relaxes by driving to a beach on the east coast "and digging my toes in the sand. I'm a workaholic," she says. "Sometimes it gets to be too much."
Burt looks around at her boon companions, the ladies, the "friends" who started it all. Over the heads of one quartet, Burt has written, "Once a queen, always a queen."
"They're for all of us who've tried to be glamorous, who are bright and bold, and aren't scared. Sometimes I get down. But then I put on some lipstick."
Jules Burt will display her work, along with about 150 other artists, at the Old Hyde Park Village Art Festival, Rome and Swann avenues, Tampa, Oct. 5 and 6. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. For festival information, call (813) 962-0388.