Art 1010 – Research Interview
Horses By; Deborah Butterfield
Kitty Baker
October 6, 2014
I chose Deborah Butterfield as the artist to interview. Born in 1949 in San Diego, lives in
Bozeman, MT and Hawaii. Is a renowned sculptor, known for sculpting horses from materials
such as wood and metal.
Examples of Butterfield's works include Lalapa (2011), Palomino (1981), and Blanket Saddle
(1972). Butterfield attended San Diego State College, in San Diego, CA, from 1966 to 1968, and
also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, in Skowhegan, ME, in 1972.
Butterfield received her Bachelor's degree and an MFA from the University of California, Davis,
in 1971 and 1973, respectively. She holds an honorary doctorate of Fine Arts from Montana
State University in Bozeman, MT (1998), and another from Rocky Mountain College in Billings,
MT (1997). Her work exudes an abstract narrative elegance that, together with her colorful
forms, have drawn comparisons to John Chamberlain. She has received numerous awards,
including a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship, an American
Academy of Achievement Award, and a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.
She has participated in a number of exhibitions including those held at the Sacramento Valley at
San Francisco State College in San Francisco, CA, in 1972; the Israel Museum in Jerusalem,
Israel, in 1981; and the Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle, WA, in 2008. Her public collections are
housed in different places, including Meijer Sculpture Gardens in Grand Rapids, MI; Yale
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University in New Haven, CT; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY.
Deborah Butterfield is represented by Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, IL, the Greg Kucera
Gallery in Seattle, WA, and La Louver in Los Angeles, CA.
Kitty: What or who has been the biggest influence on your life?
Deborah Butterfield: I give credit to my birthdate as an inspiration for my subject matter; I also
said that I would have preferred to work in the female form, but that my mentor Manuel Neri
dominated that form. Instead, I chose to create self-portraits using images of horses. Gradually,
the horses themselves became my primary theme.
Kitty: What inspired you to do your first horse sculpture?
Deborah Butterfield: Eventually, I just let myself do the horse," she says. "It was kind of a
courageous thing to do . . . in a time when conceptual art was just happening, in 1972.
"I started out as a potter and have done a lot of ceramics, and I loved the idea of making
something out of clay that wasn’t fired. So I mixed ground paper and mud and clay and plaster
and glue and straw and dirt — all this stuff together — and just covered these big, naturalisticlooking horses with mud." (Exhibit 1)
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Kitty: Tell me more about how you do your sculptures?
Deborah Butterfield: I began crafting horses out of scrap metal and cast bronze in the early
1980s. I would sculpt a piece using wood and other materials fastened together with wire, then
photograph the piece from all angles so as to be able to reassemble the piece in metal. I work
only in the winter, so pieces usually take 3 to 5 years (exhibit 2)
Kitty: What inspires you for a certain horse or sculpture?
Deborah Butterfield: I Comb the woods and creek banks near my 500-acre ranch south of
Missoula for scraps of wood, mud and debris. I scour junkyards and foundries, driving around
the state as well as other areas of the United Sates for the right scrap metal to craft my horse.
All of my work has the same format, with the horses either standing still or lying down. But like
a portrait artist capturing an individual sitter, I make each animal unique. My style has evolved
over the years to a cleaner, less-hidden view of the individual horse. My earlier work seems to be
more a vehicle for a self-portrait; now my work is clearly focused on capturing each horse.
(Exhibit 3)
Kitty: I have heard that one of your sculptures was damaged?
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Deborah Butterfield; A car crash heavily damaged my horse sculpture at Purdue (exhibit 4). The
1,700-pound bronze sculpture, commissioned for Purdue in 2009, is estimated to be worth
hundreds of thousands of dollars. “It’s one of the most exceptional horses I have mad made.
Kitty: Why do people call you work the darker side of life?
Deborah Butterfield: As an artist I create sculptures of horses, I try to reveals the deep passion
for the creature, but I also confront the darker side of life. Horses die, and they break your heart,
just like children do. My work is more about life and death, and about that full circle of life.
Kitty: have you ever considered doing other types of sculptures other than horses?
Deborah Butterfield: My work is horses, but essentially, the bodies are like these long rectangles
that are suspended on legs. . . . I don’t add the head and neck until the very end, kind of long
using either the crushed metal or the sticks in an abstract way. My work is not so overtly about
movement. My horses' gestures are really quite quiet, because real horses move so much better
than I could pretend to make things move. For the pieces I make, the gesture is really more
within the body, it's like an internalized gesture, which is more about the content, the state of
mind or of being at a given instant. And so it's more like a painting...the gesture and the
movement is all pretty much contained within the body. - Deborah Butterfield (Exhibit 5)
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Kitty: What is your favorite childhood memory?
Deborah Butterfield: I was born "on the day of the Kentucky Derby" in 1949 in San Diego,
"Before I could talk, I would point at the horses at the little pony fairs they used to have in the
early 1950s," My parents were too poor to buy a horse, but they arranged riding lessons for me
around age 5. Horses and riding became my lifelong passion
Kitty: Mountains or the beach? View,
Deborah Butterfield:
I enjoy both as I have a studio in Hawaii and the ranch in Montana. I married sculptor John
Buck in 1974. We have two sons and divide our time between homes in Montana and Hawaii.
Kitty: How would you describe your work today?
Deborah Butterfield:
Today, I considers my style to be somewhere in between traditional
equine art and modern, contemporary art. I have taken a brave and unique path in the world of
art. It is in this way that others consider me to be a pioneer in the world of art. Feelings, ideas,
and passions. Whatever style my sculptures may be, they are definitely a contribution to equine
art and art in general.
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Deborah Butterfield Exhibit 1
Untitled
mud, straw, whitewash, life-size 1976
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Deborah Butterfield Exhibit 2
Red and Yellow
1997
Found steel, welded, 87 x 120 x 28 inches
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Deborah Butterfield Exhibit 3
Rockford:
for many years, Butterfield has acquired scrap metal by the ton from a salvage yard in Rockford,
Illinois. When this pile of rebar arrived at her studio, with its large chunks of concrete still
attached, the artist recognized its promising opportunity. Butterfield welded the forcibly bent
rebar to cage the concrete within the sculpture.
ROCKFORD, 2013
Welded found steel with concrete 41.5 x 49 x 14.5 inches
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Deborah Butterfield Exhibit 4
Silver Bow” Deborah Butterfield sculpture, Purdue |
“Silver Bow” Deborah Butterfield sculpture, Purdue
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Deborah Butterfield Exhibit 5
New Sculptures,' by Deborah Butterfield, at Chicago's Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, with 'Cascade,'
2014, cast bronze, 37 x 121 x 65″ in foreground
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Sysnopsis
Deborah Butterfield says, “Horses are the format I’ve chosen for interpreting my thoughts.”
As a young child, horses “filled my eye as the most important thing in my life.” As she grew up
and got more familiar with horses, she at first thought she wanted to become a veterinarian. A
severe car accident gave her both a lasting awareness of the potential closeness of death at any
minute as well as a settlement that financed her way through college and acquisition of her first
horse. Soon she began making and then teaching art. Her first medium was clay. When she
made the transition to horses, one of her first pieces was a pair of ceramic hooves.
As her sculpted horses sold well, she was able to build a sleek modern barn and indoor arena,
where she enables a small group of people to board horses, practice dressage, and participate in
occasional clinics. She also has provided opportunities to handicapped people to ride. In all
these ventures she has paid close attention to horses and learned much about their ways and
manners.
She is keenly aware of how horses seek to be in dialogue with us. When we sit upon their backs,
we feel a sense of being carried through space, in a way that we can’t get from our own
legs. The horses know our weaknesses but also our leadership skills. Deborah compares
working with them to dancing with different individuals who can’t talk to you. Much has to do
with body language. Rider and horse fumble around but when the right move is found, both feel
a certain happiness.
In her art Deborah expands on the impressions she gets from being around horses. While her
horses seem to be true to their essences, in actuality her standing horses are taller than they
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would be. She uses the horse’s body as an abstract rectangular canvas that she can paint with
mud, sticks, steel, aluminum, or bronze.
Through her materials Deborah Butterfield has had the skill to express her transcendent thoughts
and evoke deep feeling responses in us. She also wants people to feel empathy for horses. “I’m
trying to get the viewer to project himself or herself into the form of the horse. I want people to
actually be able to crawl into that shape and inhabit it, and to perceive in a different way.” All of
Butterfield's horses are mares, which she conceived from the first as symbolic self-portraits. "I
first used the horse images as a metaphorical substitute for myself–it was a way of doing a selfportrait one step removed from the specificity of Deborah Butterfield." The Madison Art Center
(now Madison Museum of Contemporary Art took pride of place in having organized
Butterfield's first solo exhibition in 1976. It's easy to connect with these horses. From cave
drawings to the present, we know them as friends and helpers. Symbols in American myth,
they're lionized in art. Racehorses, broncos, wild mustangs, carriage and work horses rear up,
prance, gallop, jump or transport riders. In contrast, this artist's noble horses stand or lie
untethered, steeped in blissful primal spirits
Robert Gordon, author of Deborah Butterfield tells us, "When I look at her horses, I see
something important that perhaps Butterfield is too modest to acknowledge-if there is a feminine
strength and receptiveness to her horse sculptures that are made of old steel letters and... other
detritus of industry, it is Butterfield who has put it there." Though Deborah may not admit it,
Deborah's horses can have powerful influences on viewers. It may be the symbolism in each
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sculpture that makes her art so powerful. Deborah considers each sculpture to be a self portrait,
displaying her feelings, ideas, and passions. Whatever style Deborah's sculptures may be, they
are definitely a contribution to equine art and art in general.
Media Used
* Bronze
* Ceramic Art, Porcelain
* Copper, Coppersmithing
* Found Objects, Junk, Recycled Materials
* Metal, Metalwork, Metal Plates, Metal Point
* Mixed-Media, Multi-Media
* Oil Paint
* Plaster
* Pottery
* Steel, Stainless Steel
* Wire
* Wood
Methods
* Ceramics
* Murals of Fresco, Mixed Media, Mosaic or Paint
* Sculpture, Sculptor
Styles
* Abstraction and Realism; Semi Abstract
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Subjects
* Animals, Mammals
* Horses, Equestrian Genre
* Wildlife, Wild Animal
Chronology
* Early 21st Century
* Late 20th Century After 1950
Added Description
* Abstraction Specialty
* Horse Subject Specialty
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Danuta and Burnt Pine
Red Branch
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Lani
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References
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
1.Jump up Grace Glueck, "Art in Review: Deborah Butterifeld," The New YorkTimes,
January 16
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2.Fichner-tathus, lois. Undertanding Art. n.d.
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3.Heller, Jules and Nancy G. Heller. North American Women Artists of the Twentieth
Century. n.d.
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4. 2004.http://www.lalouver.com/html/exhibition.cfm
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5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_Butterfield
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6.https://sites.google.com/site/seaiansportfolio/home/inquirythemes/communication/deborah-butterfield-artistic-statement
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