By Mark S. Guralnick
Staff Writer

  Fifteen thousand feet above the ocean, a 39-year-old pilot named Jim Butler was trying to draw angels, seagulls and "a flying screw."
  Below, artists and art lovers were mixing in a vivid, almost garish, display of colors.
  "I think it's absurdity," said Sarasota painter Syd Solomon, pointing to the sky-writing airplane.  "It's so outrageously crazy that anyone who thinks he could do it should be able to do it."

Staff phoes by WALTER MICHOT
With the heavens as canvas and an airplane as paint brush skywriter Jim Butler soars above Hollywood.

Pilot Jim Butler turns South Florida upside-down as he takes a topsy-turvy approach to traditional art.

  That was the scene Saturday at the Hollywood Art and Culture Center.  Colorful zaniness on the ground, and a man in a plane in the sky blowing white smoke onto a celestial canvas.
  Almost 2,000 people poured onto the beachside lot of the culture center to watch the "Air Affair," look at paintings and listen to music.
  Twenty artists from around the country were asked to submit designs to be reproduced by Butler, and many of them also showed up to see if Butler could do it.
  But then, at 2 p.m., came an unwelcome, uninvited guest - the wind.
  Try as he did, Butler couldn't get the eight selected pieces of "sky art" to say in one spot.
  "The whole thing's a  disaster," snapped  one observer, Debbie Bochi, a 19-year-old from Hallandale, as the artistic etchings vanished.
  Wendy Blazier, the project curator, began skulking in and out of the crowd in her re and blue, Lucite-sculptured earrings and light purple eye shadow.  She tried to help a photographer capture the images before they blew away.
  But, using ice crystals and paraffin oil, Butler managed to paint the "flying screw," an odd spiral creation by Miami painter Fernando Garcia.  "To me," Garcia said, "it was the most exotic medium I ever worked with."