Creative Corner

Featuring Butlers who apply their Creative Talents to their Art and their Profession

We are expanding this monthly column to include other butlers who, not surprisingly, given the level of creativity the position requires, enjoy skills in the fine arts. If you, or any butler you know, are a creative artist in no matter what genre, please feel free to submit your/their works to the editor of the Modern Butlers’ Journal.

Next month, we hope to include “The Butler who Paints,” and for this month, we have a wonderful surprise:

Rick Fink

Introducing a very senior butler—Mr. Rick Fink, whom you may well recognize as the principal of the Butler Valet School in England, someone who has been in the profession for over six decades, as well as a venerable member of the just-launched International Butler Trainer Alliance. As a long-time reader of this Journal, we finally welcome him in his capacity as a contributor of his other passion—painting.

Artistry runs in his family—his son, Graham Fink, is an accomplished fine painter, so the apple did not fall far from the tree. This photograph on the left was taken two years ago by the renowned photographer and film director, John Rankin Waddell.

While Mr. Fink calls himself a Master Forger (you’ll see why in subsequent issues of the Journal), the self portrait on the right, the first of his works that we will feature, shows he has an uncanny knack of capturing character, just like Rankin, in his original works of art.

Kobi Gutman

In celebration of his tenth year since first developing his carving and sculpting skills as a butler, beginning with a simple apple carved for turndown, Mr. Gutman has created a short presentation, Evolution of an Artist, to show how he developed his skills and that a similar path is within reach for any who care to embark upon it.

Mr. Kobi Gutman is one of the most accomplished hotel butlers in the world, currently working as the head butler at a private hotel in Florida; he can be reached via the Institute.

The Institute is dedicated to raising service standards by broadly disseminating the mindset and superior service expertise of that time-honored, quintessential service provider, the British Butler, updated with modern people skills, and adapted to the needs of modern employers and guests in staffed homes, luxury hotels, resorts, spas, retirement communities, jets, yachts & cruise ships around the world.