Deborah Butterfield's Horses: Allegories of the Spirit
By Ellen B. Cutler
Horses have been Deborah Butterfield's only models for well over twenty years. Butterfield was born on the day Ponder made an explosive run from behind to win the Kentucky Derby in 1949, and her admiration for-and identification with-horses infuses her earliest memories. "I wanted to be with horses before I could talk. My father got me riding lessons when I was little... Unrequited love for horses probably drove me to make horses, to have their company in my studio," she says.
A graduate of the University of California at Davis (B.A., 1972; M.F.A., 1973), Butterfield speaks affectionately of several of the art faculty, all of them champions of the possibilities of figural art and representation. These artists include William T. Wiley, who taught her "how to begin"; the late Robert Arneson, whom she describes as the "devil's advocate"; Manuel Neri; and Roy De Forest, her "guide in the world of animals and allegory." Her horses are, indeed, allegories of the spirit-to use her words, a kind of "veiled imagery."
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