Deborah Butterfield Sculptures

Deborah Butterfield, (1949- ), American artist, whose sculptures of horses have provided a means for her experiments with different materials and approaches to sculpturesque form. Her many sculptural incarnations of the horse express impalpable variations of pose, gesture, emotion, and metaphor. Butterfield started do life-sized horse sculptures in 1973, toward the end of the Vietnam War. She saw the maria as a symbol for patience, intuition, forcefulness, and affirmation of life, standing in opposition to the destructive impulses of war. She also wanted to change the base of horse sculptures with portrayals of military officers on horseback, waving swords or flags. independently of Butterfields horses expresses a different kind of energy. She constructed one series of horses from backside up and sticks, as if the animals had formed themselves from debris in the aftermath of a flood. An example from this series is Dry Fork Horse--Resting (Cara) (1977, Whitney Museum of Amer ican Art, newly York City). Another series, begun in 1979, includes see-through horses made from a miscellanea of found materials, such as steel, wood scraps, and rolls of change wire.

A representative example from this series, Scrap Iron (1981, clubby collection, Woodside, California), looks deal a jumble of metal rods and bars, except for the subtle except sure lines that define the sitting horses neck, jaw, spine, bent hindquarters, and elongate forelegs. Butterfield has tell that horses only sit when they feel secure, and that she likes the image of a header full of sitting horses because it is an image of vulnerability and strength at the same ti! me. Born in San Diego, California, Butterfield studied at San Diego State University from 1966 to 1968 and at the University of California at San Diego in 1969. She accordingly transferred to the University of California at Davis, where she completed her... If you want to get a full essay, come out it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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