Butterfield's horse sculptures: New life from old junk

By GAIL SCHONTZLER Chronicle Staff Writer

Deadfall and driftwood. Discarded scraps of steel.

From such junk, artist Deborah Butterfield creates amazing sculptures of horses.

She has an uncanny eye for finding the right curves in tree limbs and in twists of steel, curves that evoke the graceful gestures, the earthy beauty and the spirit of horses.

In a major new book documenting Butterfield's work, Jane Smiley, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "A Thousand Acres," writes an introduction. She describes the first time she encountered Butterfield's horses, standing on Huntington Street in Boston, among skyscrapers and traffic, near an on-ramp to Interstate 90.

"When I first saw 'Paint and Henry' I walked around and around them, admiring their absolute horsiness. ... Since then, I have never met a horse lover who did not gasp at the truth of Butterfield's horses, and then again at the paradox that they are made of such industrial materials, barbed wire, bronze, pieces of junked cars, discarded metal letters."

Making art out of debris, Smiley writes, "is a valid and necessary response to one of the identifying features of our era -- the realization that we have nearly destroyed the world we live in, along with it the natural part of ourselves, and are still in danger of doing so."

The new coffee table book, "Deborah Butterfield," (Harry N. Abrams Publishers, $50) with 178 pages and 75 full-color plates, marks another milestone in a remarkable career that spans more than 30 years.

Butterfield has been able to make the kind of art she loves and not only earned enough to buy art supplies -- her modest hope as a young artist -- but achieved financial and critical success.

Her horse sculptures have been collected by the Art Institute of Chicago, High Museum in Atlanta, San Diego Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., Whitney Art Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Her work has been exhibited from Israel to Germany to Billings, where a major show at the Yellowstone Art Museum is just closing and beginning a three-year national tour. In Bozeman, two of her horses can be seen at the Botanica gallery downtown.

Butterfield's large steel sculptures, standing around 7 feet tall, sell for $200,000. The smaller bronzes go for $85,000, though a significant chunk of such prices goes toward casting and gallery fees.

"She is definitely one of the most important female sculptors working in this country," said Richard Helzer, director of Montana State University's School of Art. "She has a very large following, literally hundreds of collectors. From early on in her career, she has been recognized as a very creative person, developing interesting sculpture."

Home in Montana

Butterfield is making tea in the bunkhouse-style lounge between her studio and large horse barn on Cottonwood Road, just south of Bozeman.

It's a fun, funky room, adorned with her husband's collection of old guitars, elk and antelope trophies, her dressage ribbons, an Evel Knievel pinball game and pets curled up by the woodstove.

She wears a denim shirt and no makeup, and has intense blue eyes.

Butterfield, 54, knows she's lucky. When you choose art as a career, she says, "It's kind of like taking a vow of poverty.

"Art -- it has to be either the thing you live and breathe for, or you're no good at anything else."

She and her husband, John Buck, a successful artist in his own right, first moved to Bozeman in 1976, when he landed a job teaching art at MSU as an assistant professor. Later they were splitting the teaching job -- and making less than the university's volleyball coach. Without help from parents, they couldn't have scraped together enough for a down payment on their first home.

Thanks to their success in the art world, they have accumulated 350 acres and built a large horse barn and dressage court, where Butterfield can pursue her passion. They have another 140 acres on a quieter stretch of road nearby, a home for themselves and their two sons.

Smiley notes that one remarkable aspect of Butterfield's career is that she lives in Montana, far from the art centers of the big cities.

"My friends who are artists have lunch with critics, go to parties, get seen," Butterfield says. To do that herself, "the compromises I'd have to have made would not be worth it. My art would have been about the idea of horses. Here I ride every day, take care of them.

"Now that I know horses, the real horses are even better than my idea of them. As I get to know them, I am even more blown away by them.

"They die, they break legs, they're very fragile. Your love and joy with horses is predicated on the understanding that your joy can disappear in an instant. It's like having children. The specter of death is looming over you."

Cleaning up messes

Butterfield stands in the smaller of her two studios, where the floor is strewn with sticks and deadfall she has collected along the Gallatin and the Snake rivers. She studies one of her smaller horse sculptures in progress.

Armed with a hot-glue gun, bits of wire and the discerning eye of an artist and horsewoman, she connects the sticks. She gives them new life.

When finished, the 4-foot-tall sculpture will be cast in bronze at the Walla Walla Foundry in Washington.

When she first started making horses, she used sticks and mud, which made the sculptures fragile -- especially if left in the rain. Then she discovered the greater possibilities if she cast the sticks in bronze.

"Most of this wood is rotten and delicate," she says. "It's way more interesting than healthy, resilient sticks. It allows me more freedom of expression."

This has been a hectic week -- between Christmas, interruptions for horses, snow removal, a family crisis -- yet the horse she is creating looks pretty much at ease.

"I was in the middle of a storm when I made this," she says. "Sometimes, the rougher the go, the calmer the horse."

Butterfield says she is proud of the new book and pleased that it turned out to be so personal.

The project took more than two years. The idea came from Robert Gordon, a book designer and art consultant whose previous books focused on French Impressionists Degas and Monet.

Originally Butterfield asked writer and poet Vicki Hearne to write for the book. She loved Hearne's philosophy that when a human owner gives a command to a dog or horse, it is really an invitation to dialogue, to work together. Hearne wrote several poems for the book, but died of cancer before completing the project.

"It was very depressing," Butterfield recalls. "I felt jinxed. ... Who on earth can write this book?"

Brushing her teeth one night, an idea came to her -- Jane Smiley. Smiley's recent horse racing novel, "Horse Heaven," had horses among the characters, horses that had their own dialogue, that sounded to Butterfield exactly the way that horses would think and talk.

Butterfield found Smiley's phone number on the Internet and phoned, terrified, and left a rambling message. Smiley called right back -- she would love to write for the book.

Smiley came out to Montana in the summer of 2002 and the two women spent four days together, talking and riding horses.

"It was just like we'd always known each other," Butterfield said. "I was kind of astonished at how quickly she picks things up, how astute she is. ... She just gets right to the heart of the matter."

In the book, Smiley observes that throughout history, horses have most often appeared in sculpture as props for triumphant warriors. Butterfield's horses, by contrast, are strong yet peaceful, individuals in their own right, "expressing feelings of their own."

"To my mind," Smiley writes, Butterfield "has done a particular, honorable thing that often falls to women -- she has cleaned up the ugly messes that others have left behind, she has found beauty in the discarded and revealed it."

Butterfield laughs when reminded of Smiley's observation. It's true about women and messes, she says. "When the cat pukes on the Navajo rug, who do you think cleans it up?"

Heal the world

Butterfield phoned Smiley to ask if she'd attend a book signing this fall at the Country Bookshelf in downtown Bozeman. The first words out of Smiley's mouth were, "'Do you think horses have souls?'"

Butterfield laughs. There's no small talk with Smiley.

On the night of the signing, a large crowd came. Smiley, over 6 feet tall and imposing, told the audience that she prefers not to lecture but to take questions. A shiver of nervousness ran through the crowd. "'And I've taught freshman English for 13 years so I know how to call on people,'" Smiley declared. The audience laughed.

One of the things they have in common, Butterfield points out, is that they are both mothers. Not long ago, they would have been dismissed in the worlds of art or writing because of that.

"It used to be, you had to choose," Butterfield says. "Now it's even cool in Hollywood to show your big pregnant belly. Things have really changed. ... Now it's acceptable to be a major artist or writer and there's no penalty for being a mother, except the obvious one of having no time."

Still, it has been a struggle to be both a mother and working artist, "do two great things." If she has a regret, Butterfield says, "I wish I'd been a better mother."

One of the horses in the book, "Seawife," came about because of her older son, Wilder. The family was visiting Hawaii, and one day her son, then 11, phoned from the beach to report a shipwreck: "Mom, you can make a horse out of this!"

She smiles. "I just had to have that piece in there."

When MSU gave her an honorary doctorate in 1998, Butterfield told young graduating students that art matters, even in a world where terrible things happen. She still feels that way.

"I think art matters more than anything," she says. "Artists try to make meaning out of things, from something as small as the death of a horse, to Sept. 11.

"It's our responsibility to weave together the meanings and connections in our lives. And to heal the world."

Reader Comments