Deborah Butterfield

Ponder

the

Deborah

Butterfield

Marlborough New York 545 West 25th Street New York, NY 10001 + 1 (212) 541 4900 marlboroughnewyork.com

Marlborough Fine Art London 6 Albemarle Street London W1S 4BY + 44 (0) 20 7629 5161 marlboroughgallerylondon.com

Galería Marlborough Madrid Calle de Orfila 5 28010 Madrid, Spain +34 913 19 14 14 galeriamarlborough.com

Lawrence Weschler

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral

I.

Deborah Butterfield likes to say that she was born in 1949 on the day of the Kentucky Derby, won that year by Ponder, who was sired by Pensive, all of which seems almost too perfect. She tells the story of how early on while out on a walk with her father, they came upon one of those little traveling kiddie horse ride operations.

“It was the first time I ever saw a horse, and even though it was likely just a pony, I just knew: it perfectly filled a pony-sized hole in my existence.” At UC Davis (where she joined the nascent art program helmed by the likes of Robert Arneson, Wayne Thiebaud, Manuel Neri, William Wiley, and Roy De Forest), she managed to secure lodging at an outlying thoroughbred farm in exchange for taking care of the horses. It was a dream situation.

Deborah Butterfield working at Walla Walla Foundry studio, 2012.

Photo: Walla Walla Foundry

She started out in pottery but soon found herself making horses with metal armatures slathered over with mud (or mud darkened with India ink, to be exact), a sort of tribute to the animist New Guinea mud masks and sculptures she’d encountered in class. Sometimes, for structural support, she A-framed the creatures with rows of long narrow tree branches, tipi style. Gradually she became more and more interested in the underlying support, the scrap metal armature (“The mud just came to feel like it was icing on the cake, it wasn’t needed”).

In 1976, when Butterfield and her artist husband John Buck moved to Bozeman, Montana to teach at Montana State University, she began fashioning the horses out of pieces of mountain driftwood she’d scavenged in the hills. She had her first shows at Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in Chicago and Hansen-Fuller Gallery in San Francisco. Then she got a lucky break in 1978, when she was offered a one-woman show by Ivan Karp’s trend-setting OK Harris Gallery in New York, which proved a smashing success, and she was soon being widely collected.

“I was making these incredibly fragile things,” she recently recalled of those early days. “The small pieces especially were just sticks wired together, and the wood would shrink, the wire would stretch, the cat would knock it off the piano. And when I would go see the work in collectors’ homes it looked like roadkill. I had a traveling

show that went to twelve museums, and collectors of mine in the various cities where I would be installing the work would say, ‘Oh, let’s have a cocktail party for you.’ And I would end up spending the entire night on the floor with pliers, trying to fix those things. I did what I could, but I got so tired of that, because I just don’t have the temperament for carefully repairing things. I began to worry: Was I going to have to be doing that for the rest of my life? So that’s what led me to bronze really. I realized the color might change, but at least in a hundred years, somebody might still know my intention in terms of the form.”

By 1987, Martin Friedman at the Walker Art Center had commissioned one of her large wooden projects to be transformed into bronze for the Sculpture Garden he was beginning to build there in Minneapolis. That was the piece that first brought Butterfield to Walla Walla, a small foundry she’d begun hearing about from such fellow artists as Jim Dine and Manuel Neri which had only been launched a few years earlier by locals Mark and Patty Anderson. “Mark came up to Bozeman, and our first son Wilder had just been born, so it was 1984, I guess. And he looked at my slide talk and said, ‘Yeah, you gotta drive down a truckload of sticks and we’ll cast them in bronze and weld a piece out of it’ and that’s how we worked for quite a few years. It was the most fun I’d ever had.”

She’d bring sticks into her studio and slowly fashion them into horses, fragile structures which she would then drive over to Walla Walla, where Mark and his crew would painstakingly photodocument and then dismantle the sculptures, individually casting the branches, one at a time, into identical bronzes (the wood itself having been systematically burned to ash in the process), tooling and finishing each segment and then welding the entire sculpture back together on the far side, finessing the welds and sandblasting the whole thing, at which point Butterfield would come down again and join them for the final touches.

Nowadays, almost forty years on, the Walla Walla operation has grown into one of the most massive such artist support foundries in the world—a good dozen huge hangar-sized buildings manned by over one hundred exquisitely trained artisans, in the middle of which, just off to the side, anyway, a small one-bedroom and kitchenette apartment abutting a tall hangar studio space of its own accounts for Butterfield’s space here. Just across the driveway, there’s a vast acres-wide greenhouse, entirely given over to carefully archived piles of her collected driftwood. One of the longest-term veterans of the foundry, she is, these days fashioning the lion’s share of new work right here on site.

The other day, after we completed a gobsmacking tour of the whole facility, Butterfield and I ambled over to her studio where we found

Deborah Butterfield building bronze armature with Mark Anderson at Walla Walla Foundry, 2007. Photo: Walla Walla Foundry

Wood is gathered and sorted in Hawaii (left) and Montana (right).

three of the bronzed pieces destined for this current Marlborough show, standing, as it were at ease, each of them covered over in a first ghostly beige paint undercoat in stolid anticipation of the coming application of their patina finish. Over to the side, on a tabletop plinth, stood a new medium-sized wooden piece which Butterfield had transported in the backseat of her car on the ninehour drive down from Bozeman the day before. And it was a beauty, albeit a harrowing one, for it had been fashioned out of sticks pitch-blackened in the recent spate of wildfires, still gleaming in the crazed liquefied sap of the expiring tree. I leaned in to examine the minute craquelure of the burnt bark. “I know,” Deborah said, “terrible how beautiful it is, the riot of feeling it arouses, terror to be sure at all these rampaging fires, and yet…”

She leaned into her blackened mare. “Look at the detail in there. That craze of tiny cracks along that branch. Hard to believe that they will be able to capture it when they set the thing to bronze. But they will. Those guys are really good.”

She stepped back for a moment, evaluated the lee of the hind legs. “Hmm,” she said. “Something’s gone wrong with the left leg there, it’s gotten twisted, probably on the ride down.”

She reached in and started dragging the limb back and forth at the knee, incredibly forcefully. “Hmm,” she repeated as she

walked over to a nearby toolchest, returning with a mini handheld Japanese saw, wedged it into the offending joint and cut it clean through, carrying the amputated foreleg over to another chest and returning with a glue gun, a pair of chopsticks and some bailing wire. “I know,” she said, “brutal. But sometimes that’s how it goes.”

I’d seen this same thing though with other artists, the way that right up to the completion of the piece they can be incredibly curt and violent with their own work, in a way that a few weeks later, gallerists and conservators and collectors would never dream of being with the completed object.

Looking back over at the three prepped pieces in the middle of the room, I asked her if she enjoys doing the final color work.

“I just wasn’t trained as a painter and it’s very difficult for me. Sometimes I do love it. It’s like Mickey the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. There are some days I come in and the chemicals and the torch, everything, is just so much fun. And there are others where I cannot do one thing right. And then I accuse my assistants of having a more concentrated version of the ferric nitrate. But then I found out that in many cases it was true. I’d be working for hours to get this red blush just right whereas they’d just be spraying it on and it was happening. And so that’s when I started mixing my own chemicals, because the reason I wasn’t getting anywhere is that I didn’t have

enough ferric in the water solution. Bronze-worker’s version of secret glaze formulas!

“Here,” she said, “I’ll show you.”

She grabbed a blowtorch, reached into her back pocket for a sparker, lit the thing, and aimed the fierce blue flame at the haunch of one of the horses. Actually, I noticed that it was already a little colored, and she explained how she’d already started the previous night when she got in. “You have to heat the metal itself, get it good and hot, and then”— she reached over to a side table and grabbed a spray bottle filled with a sloshy dirty-orangish brew—“you spray or paint on the patina, ferric acid in this case, which is basically rust mixed in a water and nitric acid base which lays in a sort of reddish coloration”—she stopped spraying and applied the roaring blue flame once again—“back and forth, spray and flame, spray and flame. The heat makes the color bond to the metal. And if you want a darker coloration, you apply liver of sulfur, otherwise known in chemistry labs as sulfurated potash, but we’re all artisans here, as the guys like to say, and we prefer ‘liver of sulfur.’”

“But again, I struggle with it, getting the combination of the heat and the admixture right. What’s right for one passage won’t be for the next. And then I often don’t know what I want. It isn’t just aiming for an exact replication of the original wood itself. It’s trying

Butterfield’s patina process, 2011.

Photo: Walla Walla Foundry

for a kind of poetic justice, finding the nature of the original wood, but somehow tying everything together at the same time, so that the overall outline and the composition of the piece as a whole makes sense visually, color-wise. The color is very much part of the emotion of the piece, as with any painting, and it takes a long time. Only, here you have to do it 360 degrees. It’s not just a flat thing, you have to get underneath it, on top of it, in front and in back and on each side. And it’s exhausting and complicated; it’s a puzzle.” But it was interesting what she’d just said, that it wasn’t simply a question of trying to achieve an exact replication of the original branch, that over and beyond that—well, as the saying goes, “Making the real real is art’s job.”

“Exactly,” Butterfield concurred, “Eudora Welty.”

Butterfield’s patina process, 2013.

Photo: Walla Walla Foundry

Sculptures packed for transport.

Previous spread

Bronze fabrication welding, Walla Walla Foundry, 2013.

Photo: Walla Walla Foundry.

At work in Butterfield’s Walla Walla Foundry studio. Clockwise from left: Deborah Butterfield, Dan Mayhew, Squire Broel, Jason Treffry, Carl Longin, Brad Rude, Jeremy Lilwall. Photo: Walla Walla Foundry

Following spread

L: Walla Walla Foundry project manager Matt Ryle poses with his family in the stick greenhouse.

R: Studio assistants Jon Hickerson and Breayn Bussel building armature at Butterfield’s Walla Walla Foundry studio.

II.

I wanted to talk to you about why you only do horses.

When I first began making the horses, if anything I faced all this pressure in the opposite direction: not to be making something as old-fashioned and seemingly tapped-out as horses, to do something different. At the time I remember thinking, “Well, nobody else is going to be interested in this in a few years but I’m doing it anyway.” So, it was the opposite of a commercial decision. I mean, initially, it never occurred to my husband or me that we would actually sell art or that if we did, we’d be able to afford to live off of it. We figured teaching would have to be our primary source of income.

Of course, there are other ways of looking at that immersive choice. For instance, there’s the example of Morandi.

I love Morandi! He was a huge presence among the artists up in Davis, we all idolized him.

Interesting: the same with the Ferus artists down in Los Angeles. Indeed, Ferus mounted one of the first gallery shows of Morandi in the U.S., back in the early sixties. And sure, you could say that all he was doing was those same damn cups and bottles on

Deborah Butterfield with Willy, 2003. Photo: Rob Outlaw

Deborah Butterfield with husband John Buck on the slopes of Hualalai overlooking Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii.

spread

Finch outside Butterfield’s steel yard and studio in Bozeman, Montana.

that Bologna studio tabletop repeatedly, ad nauseum, his entire life. But in fact, each new canvas, decade after decade, proved a fresh exploration of the physics of presence, the play of light and perception, the cups and bottles providing the merest occasion. That’s the sense in which Bob Irwin considers Morandi to have been the sole successful European abstract expressionist.

Absolutely. Beyond that, it was as if Morandi, by his example, was giving a kind of permission.

It seems to me that if anything, Morandi was practicing what Kierkegaard, in his “rotation method,” characterized as the depth of experience afforded by self-limitation. That was certainly true of Morandi and may well be true of your career as well.

Doing it, at any rate, over the years, it certainly doesn’t seem redundant. The challenge remains ever-fresh, as if brand new each time, continually informed by the changing quality of intervening lived experience. And then, too, by experiments with posture and scale.

In some ways, I find those small horses more powerful, somehow more concentrated in their energy, than the big ones.

Giorgio Morandi; Still Life, c. 1943; oil on canvas

Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon.

National Gallery of Art, Washington 2006.128.29

© 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.

Giorgio Morandi; Still Life, c. 1955; oil on canvas

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Harry Lenart in honor of Rusty and Nancy Powell.

National Gallery of Art, Washington 1997.112.2

© 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.

Myself, I sometimes think of those tabletop horses of yours as your bonsai horses: fashioned out of miniature twigs which in turn stand in for bigger branches.

Meanwhile, my full-scale work seems to be getting bigger and bigger, and it’s not that I’m getting more macho. It’s more like what happened with Goya’s astigmatism. I think my handwriting is getting bigger and bigger, too, but it’s just because I’m getting blinder and blinder: it’s still the same scale to me. It’s just that my eyes have changed. I sometimes go and see my old work— the life-size work—and it’s so small and intimate and it’s actually real horse-sized and I’m kind of jealous of that work.

Coming back to your question as to why I do horses, I guess it really does have to do with riding them. I have distinct ongoing relationships with horses that is actually hands-on, every day.

Horses are like the ocean. I mean, they’re extremely civilized and domesticated. They’re very smart—maybe not at doing what people do or what dogs do but they’re really smart at what they do. They’re the best at being horses of anybody. But there is that danger and respect. The idea that at any moment they could kill you. Not that they want to. They’re just—they’re forces of nature. It can get to be like a rogue wave: you just never turn your back on the ocean.

But I guess the horses that I’m interested in are the ones that have shown an interest in getting to know me and I’m—I’m just so honored by that. Ed Kienholz used to ask me, “What is it? Do you like the power? That must be it: you just like ordering this big thing around and telling it what to do.” And I was like, no, I like asking it if it would like to join me in moving and having it in turn willingly want to do that. And part of my relationship with my horses—it’s so loving but there’s also— I mean like my old girl Isbelle, for the first five years when I got on her, every day, it was “Who’s the boss of me?” It became a joke between us. And just because I had this beautiful dynamic relationship with her didn’t mean that I didn’t have to make boundaries and occasionally get in disagreements with her. It was so hard for me learning how to be the “boss” in a way that allowed her to be herself: to make limits so that she could actually express herself in a more creative way. Of course, I had to do the same with myself.

Are you talking about horses here or are you talking about art?

I ask in part because I remember some of the way you used to talk about some of the power machinery involved, especially in making those scrap metal pieces, the scary amount of coiled energy in some of those snippers and the like. But also because— there’s this great line of the French Enlightenment encyclopedist and art critic Diderot’s where he talks about the moment when

the artist stops asking, “What can I do?” and starts asking, “What can art do?”

Indeed, those great moments when you really enter the flow, the dance, whether it’s out in my dressage arena up in Bozeman or here in the studio.

But I want to come back to this business of having been doing the same sort of thing for five decades. How is it different for you today than it was forty years ago?

Well, I think over thirty or forty years, for starters I’ve made larger piles! I’ve been able to gather more and more varied materials. And so I feel that I have more of a library of material of wood or metal or whatever such that I have more choices. The flip side is that I feel some of my early work was so wonderful because I had such limited choices. And now that I have more choices, in many ways it’s harder.

On the other hand, I also have more mastery: it just builds up, over the years, that you have more experience not only at looking at things, but just building things. And even though I’m older, I feel like in many ways I’m stronger or just more skilled at moving things. The foundry workers are always saying, “Oh, let somebody help you with that.” And part of my great

Butterfield and Isbelle, 2003.

Photo: Terri Miller

joy is lifting the bronze or the wood, knowing how to balance it, and feeling it and almost listening to it and waiting to know, to hear, where it goes. I have this great joy of especially different kinds of wood, you know how they all have different qualities, different histories.

I should say, incidentally, that while, yes, I am obviously a horse person, I am every bit as much, and in recent years maybe even more so, a tree person. I told my husband, John, that I was a tree worshipper and he replied that he was a tree hugger. I am completely captivated by the physicality and narrative that wood presents.

And for that matter, I suppose, of transformation itself. Branch into Horse into Bronze. Vegetable, Animal, and Mineral. And back again.

And yes, mineral as well. Here in Walla Walla, of course, I’m dealing mostly with the cast bronze—I don’t believe I have any welded steel pieces in this coming show—but with the bronze sticks and having had great assistants, you know, we could take anything, we could cut pieces out of an almost finished piece, reweld it, bend it, weld the places where it had cracked…part of the joy of working with bronze is that it is very malleable. It will let you do what you want with it. And

Butterfield’s patina process, 2013.

Photo: Walla Walla Foundry

the fact that I’m not making editions of these big pieces, I can come back and change my mind. We can cut a whole neck and head off, and I have a stock of armature material so I can refabricate things. That’s part of the mastery, I suppose, the sense of becoming more comfortable with erasing.

And, then having people who can make it happen is pretty fabulous, which of course is part of the advantage of a later career, because it can get very expensive, and you don’t have that sort of backing at the beginning. If it’s a steel and scrap metal horse, I can do it often alone. There’s a lot of grinding and cutting and it’s as much subtractive as it is additive, and those pieces I can just do there in Bozeman. But being able to have this studio in Walla Walla over the last decade: it used to be, whenever I drove down, I’d have to squeeze in wherever they would have me off to the side for just a few days. We’d drag all the sticks in from the field. And I didn’t have the luxury of coming back and looking at anything. But now I can walk out of the apartment at night and just grab something if it catches my eye and I’m allowed to go and fix it or wreck it, or whatever. And so, I do feel these days, I’m able to live with the evolving pieces more, which maybe gives them a little more substance somehow. Emotional substance, perhaps.

Bronze armature sticks at Walla Walla Foundry studio. Photo: Walla Walla Foundry

And then, too, I think that over the passing years, I’ve become more and more interested in manipulating the negative space, especially within the central armature which as a result feels like it’s opened out more, there’s more air, which means more breath, more life, perhaps. It’s interesting that you put it that way, because I was going to ask if now, forty years on, if there is more a sense of impending mortality, whereas at the outset of your career, you were young and your relationship with your horses was new, you were all starting out together, you were opening out on life and having kids and so forth.

There’s liveliness and airiness in that space. It’s both the grief that occasionally informs the making, but also the sheer and vivid joy that comes with the making itself: the composition, the space between, the negative space that kind of allows you to crawl in there. I think it’s about finding some kind of silence. I can’t quite describe it, but there is a meditative devotional quality to the work. And that’s where I am when I’m making it.

From the very beginning of my art making, though, loss was everywhere. My best friend died when I was twenty-one. And my father died when I was twenty-six, way too soon. I guess I just knew that people leave without any warning, and of course, animals, you know that they’re going to leave, but

often they also leave too soon without warning and you’re just never ready.

It’s such a lesson in impermanence and enjoying each moment. The pain that you go through when they leave: just the volume of their loss. It leaves a hole in the force, this vacuum that’s then there for quite a long time, interrupting the flow of everything.

I can’t emphasize enough how the making itself for the longest stretch remains an abstract activity, and very much materialbased. Eventually it ends up being a horse, but it really doesn’t start out being a horse. It’s this rectangle on four legs and I stuff it full of this composition that’s reacting to the material, the weight of it, the mass, the volume, the surface, the motion in it. And so I come up with this composition and as you’ve seen, I can be very brutal with it. But it’s very ‘not a horse’. It’s not sad. It’s really only towards the end when I add a neck and head and all of a sudden this abstract composition informs me as to who it is that then becomes personified, and it’s then that it becomes emotional. It’s like being a surgeon, or a veterinarian: in order to do your job, you do have to be able to step back and become…

Well, you have to have a passionate equivalence.

Exactly. That’s a good phrase.

Which in turn reminds me, speaking of negative space, of the poet John Keats’s notion of negative capability, this capacity which he talked about in some of his letters, and very famously so among literary critics, about—I’m gonna mangle this a little bit—but the capacity in great artists, with Shakespeare being the prime example, of their being able to lounge in contradiction without the irritable grasping after certainties.

Wow. That’s lovely.

And it seems to me that that may have something to do with the coexistence in your work of grief and joy.

Mainly there is this joy and gratitude that I’m still able to do what I can do. The joy of moving and being in the woods and gathering sticks and being able to drive down here to Walla Walla and getting to work with other people, it is a joyful thing. When I’m doing that and am in my studio, I try not to think about the other stuff.

But it’s still striking that you are trying to make the impermanent permanent. After we are gone, these pieces of yours will still be here.

Butterfield welding steel sculpture at Montana studio, 2004.

I just want people to see what I intended them to see. And I just don’t think about immortality, I’m not interested. I really am more about the moment. And as for the bronze, you know, it’s still alive. It’s always changing, it’s oxidizing. The color won’t always be as I intended. The sticks are like threedimensional brush strokes. And there is an emotion and an energy that’s almost like an X-ray of a given moment. It may not have anything to do with the horse really, but the horse is my container for those feelings. It’s like a vessel that contains that kind of energy. I started out as a potter, and in a sense that’s what I still am: a maker of vessels.

It’s funny: patina and painting are almost anagrams of each other. But when you are laying on the patina, you want it to be just good enough to call attention, once again, to the structure and the air and the negative spaces, all of that, but not have the virtuosity of the effect get in the way.

Westermann’s pieces were very much about virtuosity sufficient to serve ideas, just like Magritte: but they weren’t trompe l’oeil, they didn’t need to be absolutely exact to carry over the idea, just good enough.

And yours?

I hope so. The idea isn’t as—with both Magritte and Westermann—they were both more narrative. Ironic, funny. And my horse is not quite such a narrative idea. To me, it’s narrative in the sense of the journey of the wood or the metal or whatever material I found that leads us to that point. But it’s not a narrative that’s in words.

The other day at the Seattle airport, you were telling me, some kids, coming upon your piece there were excitedly saying, “Look, it’s made out of wood!” I assume it doesn’t bother you if people don’t realize it’s actually made out of bronze.

It doesn’t. I think it’s so refreshing. It means I’ve done my job.

What do you imagine that the ideal owner of a piece of yours is in terms of how it exists in their lives. They didn’t make it, so they don’t have the muscle memory of having made it.

Ideally, the piece becomes a touchstone. I hope by standing next to them you can understand them and feel their energy through your skin. They are quiet and reflect you back on yourself. They are a safe spot to observe things from and, if you are like our cats who live in the reclining sculpture outside our barn in Bozeman, it is a spot from which to wait for birds. Spiders and birds like to live in them, and wasps. I mean,

I guess I feel honored that other species seem to appreciate them. Though…many woodpeckers have hurt themselves.

Is that true?

Oh yes.

That’s literally the old Zeuxis trope come to life, the fifth-century BC Greek master painter whose murals of grapes were so vivid that birds flew down to try to snatch them. A presence.

Which I think we all need, a presence. Which is why I almost prefer them indoors, playing off the wall, the enclosure, but radiating, as you say, that sense of presence. We’re all too busy doing so many stupid things. You know, I practiced karate. I practice dressage. And I guess my whole life is devoted to just trying to slow things down so that we can be in the present.

III.

While Butterfield excused herself to freshen up before dinner, my own attention returned to the three ghostly prepped horses arrayed in the gathering dusk.

Most horse artists tend to cast their creatures in the vividness of action—strutting, rearing up, lunging forward—arrested snapshots plucked from hurtling time. Whereas Butterfield, it occurred to me, always seems to present her horses in moments of stilled repose, just standing or lying there, consumed in their horsey thoughts, as time passes. Like Vermeer’s women, who are always posed in the midst of having to stand still for some reason (to assay a balance, to pour milk, to read a letter or evaluate a necklace in a mirror), Butterfield’s horses are not trapped in the immediate present tense: rather, they are, yes, themselves emblems of presence, of duration. Which is to say, paradoxically, for all their calm, they are perhaps more vividly alive. They are not performing for us or even looking over at us, they seem heedless of our presence, which is also key to the effect.

Butterfield now rejoined me in the studio, tamping down her washed hair with a towel. “I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse’s good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.”

“Who said that?” I asked “Wittgenstein.”

“Philosophy unties knots in our thinking, hence its results will be simple,” I counter-quoted the Viennese master, in lines that applied as well, I suspect, to a certain sort of artmaking. “But philosophizing has to be as complicated as the knots it unties.”

“Touché,” Butterfield parried.

I tried out on her my notion about how her horses never seem to be looking over at us, lounging as they do in the sovereign amplitude of their own sheer horsiness.

“Actually,” she corrected, “horses are in fact taking you in: their eyes are on the side of their heads. Unlike carnivores who focus frontally, horses have nearly 360-degree vision. They are prey animals. They are often looking at you sideways.”

That’s interesting, though I don’t think most people realize that. Most people think that the horse is looking at what it’s facing, and hence, in looking at your horses, they have the experience of a creature momentarily oblivious to themselves.

Inky the cat in sticks at Walla Walla Foundry studio.

Where you’re right, I think, is that horses are more Zen than that. They’re aware but not aware. They’re like the moon, they notice you, but they don’t necessarily care.

And I guess my point is that in the dance of projection and counter projection that you’re having, that horse is so lifelike, that horse really is like it’s in a field, and it couldn’t give a damn about you.

“Is there a God? Does that God love me or is God just the majesty of gravity?” And, to me, that’s what it is. It cares in the sense that it’s also wonderful and grand, but really it is so impermanent. Here today, gone tomorrow.

So, you are a religious sculptor after all. In his essay on you in the Abrams monograph, John Yau had a great line where he quotes this one professor to the effect that when the eighth-century Chinese master Han Gan painted horses, he truly was a horse. But it strikes me that your work actually takes things a bit further. If you only sculpted trees, this likely wouldn’t happen—and it doesn’t happen with military horses or Remingtons rearing up—but when Butterfield fashions horses out of trees, somehow this play of leapfrogging projections kicks in, such that when Butterfield makes horses, you the viewer becomes the horse.

 Han Gan, Night-Shining White (detail), c. 750, handscroll; ink on paper

Purchase, The Dillon Fund Gift, 1977.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Now look: You’re making me cry.

But yeah, that’s what I’m hoping for: That people might leave their own identity for a moment and crawl into this other being that doesn’t have a way of understanding through language. That for a moment you could be without words, you’d have to just shut up and listen and look.

Because, after all, to borrow a phrase, seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.

Plates

Sweetgrass

2021 – 2022 90 × 108 × 33 in.

Bow Tie

2021 – 2022

85 × 105 × 36 in.

Three Rivers

2021 – 2022

94 × 108 × 50 in.

Plaid 2021 – 2022 34.25 × 36 × 12 in.

Floweree

2021 – 2022 41 × 51.5 × 13 in.

Persimmon

2021 – 2022 32.5 × 42 × 12 in.

The large-scale horses on the following pages illustrate the process of casting in steel. The images are of the wood horses before being disassembled and cast.

To make the horses, sticks are chosen and assembled. Once the sticks have been assembled, the connection details within are well-documented. The horse is then disassembled and the sticks are cut down to manageable pieces. Each part is tagged with an identification number so that it can be tracked through the next steps of the process.

Each stick is then attached to a wax assembly called a cup or an H gate, which will become placeholders for where and how the metal will flow into the cavity that is formed in the next step.

The wax and wood assemblage is then dipped in a ceramic slurry followed by a dip in heat resistant sand. This is repeated several times until a durable shell is built up. When the ceramic slurry has dried, the whole unit is placed in a kiln which melts the wax and burns the wood out.

This process results in a mold and metal delivery system, which gets blown out and rinsed to remove remaining ash. It is then ready to receive the molten bronze.

Bronze ingot is melted at a temperature of 1900 degrees and poured into the ceramic shell. The shell is preheated to assist the metal flow.

Once the metal has cooled the ceramic shell is removed and any remaining shell is sandblasted off. The parts can now be welded back into full sticks. These parts are then assembled to make the horse.

– Matt Ryan

Alana (an offering)

× 47 × 12.5 in.

Bridger

2021 – 2022 39 × 50 × 16 in.

List of Works

1.

Sweetgrass, 2021 – 2022

90 × 108 × 33 in.

2. Bow Tie, 2021 – 2022

85 × 105 × 36 in.

3. Three Rivers, 2021 – 2022

94 × 108 × 50 in.

4.

Plaid, 2021 – 2022

34.25 × 36 × 12 in.

5. Floweree, 2021 – 2022

41 × 51.5 × 13 in.

6. Persimmon, 2021 – 2022

32.5 × 42 × 12 in.

7. Alana (an offering), 2022

37 × 47 × 12.5 in.

8. Pua (flower), 2022

35.5 × 42 × 10 in.

9. Bridger, 2021 – 2022

39 × 50 × 16 in.

Biography

1949 Born in San Diego, California

Education

1998 Black Belt, Nippon Kokusai Karate, Kailua-Kona, Hawaii

1996 Black Belt, Wado Ryo Karate, Bozeman, Montana

1973 University of California, Davis

1972 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, Maine

1970-2 University of California, Davis

1969 University of California, San Diego

Big Creek Pottery, Santa Cruz, California, Summer Ceramic Workshop

1966-8 San Diego State College, California

Solo Exhibitions

2020 Sculpture, Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, Washington

2019

Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, Illinois

2018 Sculpture, Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, Washington

2017

Horses, Vero Beach

Museum of Art, Vero Beach, Florida

New Sculpture, Danese/Corey, New York, New York

Three Sorrows, LA Louver, Venice, California

2016 Deborah Butterfield: Heart Butte, LA Louver ,Venice, California

New Sculpture, Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, Illinois

Sculpture, Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, Washington

Horses, The Mennello Museum of American Art, Orlando, Florida

2015 The Nature of Horses, Denver Botanic Gardens, Denver, Colorado

2014

Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, Illinois

New Sculpture, Danese/Corey, New York, New York

Chinese New Year 2014, Beverly Hills Conference and Visitors Bureau, Beverly Hills, California

Miami Project, Miami, Florida

2013 Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, California Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, Washington

2012 Essence: The Horses of Deborah Butterfield, Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, Michigan New Sculptures, LA Lover, Venice, California

2011 Seven Bronze, Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, Washington New Sculpture, Danese, New York, New York

2010 Equine Muse, Yellowstone Art Museum, Billings, Montana New Sculpture, Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, Illinois Noble Steeds, Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton, New Jersey

2009 LA Lover Gallery, Venice, California

Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, California 425 Market Street, San Francisco, California

2008 New Sculpture, Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, Washington

2007 Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa

Horses, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, Nevada New Sculpture, Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, Illinois

2006 Hunter Art Museum, Chattanooga, Tennessee

Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona

New Sculptures in Steel and Bronze, Gallery Paule Anglim

San Francisco, California

Art Association of Jackson Hole, Wyoming

LA Louver Gallery, Venice, California

2005 University Art Museum, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, Louisiana

New Sculpture, Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, Illinois

Horses, Mesa Contemporary Arts at Mesa Arts Center, Mesa, Arizona

Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, SUNY Purchase, New York

Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, Washington

Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida Park Avenue Median, Between 52nd and 54th Street, New York, New York

Recent Sculpture, Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, New York

2004 Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle Washington

LA Louver, Venice, California

Yellowstone Art Museum, Billings, Montana

Sculpture, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, California

The Contemporary Museum of Art, Honolulu, Hawaii Appleton Museum of Art, Ocala, Florida

2003 Recent Sculpture, Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, New York

2002 The Horses of Deborah Butterfield, Holter Museum of Art, Helena, Montana

UnCommon Lives: Extraordinary Women in the Arts, Rockford College, Rockford, Illinois

New Sculpture, Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, Illinois Jundt Art Museum, Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington

2001 Figures of Horses, Bellevue Art Museum, Bellevue, Washington Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, Washington Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, California

2000 Recent Sculpture, Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, New York

1999 Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, Washington

Sculpture, Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, Illinois

1998 Botanica Gallery, Bozeman, Montana

1997 Found Metal and Cast Bronze Horses, Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, Washington Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, California

1996 New Bronze Sculptures, Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, Illinois

San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, California Sculpture, Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, New York

1994 Sculpture 1980 to 1992, Madison Art Center, Madison, Wisconsin Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, California Sculpture, Beall Park Art Center, Bozeman, Montana Horses, Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, Washington

Deborah Butterfield: Recent Work, The CLC Gallery, Bethel College, St. Paul, Minnesota

1993 Sculpture, Beall Park Art Center, Bozeman, Montana

Deborah Butterfield: Recent Sculpture, Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, New York

1992 Horses: The Art of Deborah Butterfield, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida

Deborah Butterfield: New Work, Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, Illinois

1991 Sculpture, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, California

Sculpture, Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, Washington

1990 Recent Sculpture, Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, New York

Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, Illinois

1989 Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, California

Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, Illinois

1988 The Faith and Charity In Hope Gallery, Hope, Idaho

1987 DeWeese Contemporary Gallery, Bozeman, Montana

1986 Contemporary Art Center, Honolulu, Hawaii

Recent Sculpture, Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, New York

1985 Still Horses, Ohio State University Gallery of Fine Art, Columbus, Ohio

Fuller Goldeen Gallery, San Francisco, California

1984 Ponder and Smokey, Concourse Gallery, Bank of America

World Headquarters, San Francisco

OK Harris Works of Art, New York, New York

Galerie Ninety-Nine, Bay Harbor Islands, Florida

University Gallery, University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada

1983 New Mexico State University Gallery, Las Cruces, New Mexico

Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, WinstonSalem, North Carolina

San Antonio Art Institute, San Antonio, Texas

The Oakland Museum, Oakland, California

Aspen Center for the Visual Arts, Aspen, Colorado

Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, Illinois

Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, Illinois

1982 OK Harris Gallery, New York, New York

Mayor Gallery, London, United Kingdom

Seattle Art Museum, Volunteer Park, Seattle, Washington

Asher/Faure Gallery, Los Angeles, California Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas, Texas

1981 Jerusalem Horses, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel

Hansen Fuller Goldeen Gallery, San Francisco, California Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island

Visiting Artist Exhibition, Galerie Rudolf Zwirner, Cologne, Germany

ARCO Center for the Visual Arts, Los Angeles, California,

traveled to Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, Oklahoma; University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma; St. Louis, Missouri; University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, Colorado; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; The Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington; The Boise Gallery, Boise, Idaho; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, Utah

1980 Open Gallery, Eugene, Oregon

1979 New Sculpture, Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, Illinois

OK Harris Gallery, New York, New York

1978 OK Harris Gallery, New York, New York

Lee Hoffman Gallery, Birmingham, Michigan Hansen Fuller Gallery, San Francisco, California

1977 Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, Illinois

1976 Madison Art Center, Madison, Wisconsin

Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, Illinois

1973 M.F.A. Exhibition: Deborah Butterfield, Nelson I.C. Gallery, University of California, Davis

Butterfield riding in Iceland.

Museum and Public Collections

Anderson Collection at Stanford University, Stanford, California

Arizona State University Museum, Tempe, Arizona

Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois

Autry National Center, Los Angeles, California

Baker Museum, Naples, Florida

Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland

Berkeley Art Museum, University of California

Boise Art Museum, Idaho

Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine

Brooklyn Museum, New York, New York

Canada College, Redwood City, California

Central Washington University, Ellensburg, Washington

Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia

Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio

Circus World Museum, Baraboo, Wisconsin

Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine

Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia

Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio

The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii

Copley Square, Boston, Massachusetts

Dallas Art Museum, Texas

Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Massachusetts

Delaware Museum of Art, Wilmington, Delaware

Des Moines Art Center, Iowa

Denver Art Museum, Colorado

Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, University of California, Los Angeles, California

Fredrick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, Malibu, California

Greenwich Arts Council, Connecticut

Hirshhorn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, District of Columbia

Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee

Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana

Institute of Contemporary Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia

Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, California

Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel

Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska

Kalamazoo Institute of Art, Kalamazoo, Michigan

Kansas City Zoo, Kansas City, Missouri

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Kansas City, Missouri

Lowe Museum, University of Miami, Florida

Lynden Sculpture Garden, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin

Manetti Shrem Museum of Art & Fine Arts Collections,

Deborah Butterfield, Willy, 1997; painted and patinated bronze Installation at the Denver Art Museum: Funds from the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation, UMB Bank Trustees. 1996.198.1-3.

Photo by Eric Stephenson

 Previous spread

Deborah Butterfield, Terre, 1988; steel, with traces of old paint

Brooklyn Museum; purchased with funds given by Werner H. Kramarsky, Henry Welt, Harry Kahn and A. Augustus Healy Fund, 88.166.

Photo by Brooklyn Museum

Deborah Butterfield, Horse, 1985; sheet steel, paint, wire, and steel Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Thomas M. Evans, Jerome L. Greene, Joseph H. Hirshhorn, and Sydney and Frances Lewis Purchase Fund, 1985. 85.11.

Following spread

Deborah Butterfield, Three Sorrows (quake, tsunami, meltdown from Gretel Ehrlich’s Facing the Wave), 2016, unique cast bronze and found elements Installation at Tia Collection. Private collection.

Davis, California

McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas

Meijer Sculpture Gardens, Grand Rapids, Michigan

Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, New York

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York

Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin

Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, New Jersey

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California Museum of Fine Arts, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida

Muskegon Museum of Art, Muskegon, Michigan

National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, District of Columbia

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri

Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, Nevada

New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, New Jersey

New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana

Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida

Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, California

Ohio University, Athens, Ohio

Palm Springs Desert Museum, California

Pasadena City College, California

Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona

Portland International Airport, Oregon

Principal Financial Group, Des Moines, Iowa

REACH, at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, District of Columbia

Samuel P. Harn Museum, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida

San Diego Museum of Art, California

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California

San Jose Museum of Art, California

Seattle Art Museum, Washington

Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Washington

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, District of Columbia

Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana

Speed Museum, Louisville, Kentucky

Stanford Medical Center, Stanford, California

Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio

Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansas

University of California, Davis, Alumni Center, California

University of California, Los Angles, Franklin D. Murphy

Sculpture Garden, California

University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital, Iowa City, Iowa

University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington, Kentucky

University of Washington Medical Center, Seattle, Washington

Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, Utah

Vero Beach Museum of Art, Florida

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia

Walker Art Center and Sculpture Garden, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Weatherspoon Art Museum, Sculpture Garden,

Greensboro, North Carolina

Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York

Leigh Yawkey Woodson Museum, Wausau, Wisconsin

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut

Yellowstone Art Museum, Billings, Montana

Woodrow, 1988, cast bronze with patina

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN

Acknowledgments

I have so many people to thank for this catalog and show. Of course, thank you to Doug Walla, Diana Burroughs, Marissa Moxley, Mariah Tarvainen, and all of the wonderful staff at Marlborough Gallery. I’m grateful to Patterson Simms, who first introduced me to Doug Walla.

Many thanks to Lawrence Weschler for a wonderful interview and conversation.

Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, LA Louver Gallery, and Greg Kucera Gallery were so kind to help us locate photographs for this catalog. Thank you to Walla Walla Foundry and Blue Mountain Foundry for helping me produce this work.

In Montana, my thanks to Carly Fraysier for helping with everything from editing to photography to studio assistance and material collecting and packing, as well as to Emma Ulen-Klees for photography and studio assistance.

Most of all, thank you to John, Wilder, and Hunter Buck for their love and support in and out of the studio.

– Deborah Butterfield

Deborah Butterfield with Spotty in barn in Bozeman, Montana.

The Anderson family

 Previous spread

Deborah Butterfield selecting sticks to build bronze horses with studio assistant Richard Graham at Walla Walla Foundry, 2019.

Photo: Walla Walla Foundry

Marlborough New York

Douglas Kent Walla CEO dkwalla@marlboroughgallery.com

Sebastian Sarmiento Director sarmiento@marlboroughgallery.com

Nicole Sisti

Assistant to Sebastian Sarmiento sisti@marlboroughgallery.com

Diana Burroughs Director burroughs@marlboroughgallery.com

Alexa Burzinski Director burzinski@marlboroughgallery.com

Bianca Clark Head of Graphics clark@marlboroughgallery.com

Parks Busby Graphics Assistant busby@marlboroughgallery.com

Meghan Boyle Kirtley Administrator boyle@marlboroughgallery.com

Greg O’Connor Comptroller greg@marlboroughgallery.com

DiBomba Jean Marie Kazadi Bookkeeper kazadi@marlboroughgallery.com

Amy Caulfield Head Registrar caulfield@marlboroughgallery.com

Sarah Gichan

Assistant Registrar gichan@marlboroughgallery.com

Mariah Tarvainen Graphic Designer tarvainen@marlboroughgallery.com

Lukas Hall Archivist hall@marlboroughgallery.com

Marissa Moxley Archivist moxley@marlboroughgallery.com

Rita Peters Gallery Assistant peters@marlboroughgallery.com

John Willis Warehouse Manager willis@marlboroughgallery.com

Anthony Nici Master Crater nici@marlboroughgallery.com

Peter Park Exhibition Coordinator park@marlboroughgallery.com

Jeff Serino

Preparator serino@marlboroughgallery.com

Brian Burke Preparator burke@marlboroughgallery.com

Matt Castillo Preparator castillo@marlboroughgallery.com

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Deborah Butterfield

On view November 3, 2022 – January 14, 2023 Marlborough New York

© 2022 Lawrence Weschler; Animal, Vegetable, Mineral

All rights reserved. Used with permission.

All work by Deborah Butterfield: © 2022 Deborah Butterfield / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Design and Layout: Mariah Tarvainen Editor: Marissa Moxley

Printing and Binding: Permanent Press

© 2022 Marlborough Gallery, New York

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including information storage and retrieval systems—except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper—without permission in writing from the publisher.

First Edition

ISBN: 978-0-89797-364-9