For Jim Victor and Marie Pelton, there’s something appealing about butter.
And not just as a food product, but as an artistic medium.
“It’s a unique material,” said Pelton, who, together with Victor, has sculpted the butter sculpture for the New York State Fair for several years. “You end up working in the butter booth for 10 days, which would never happen with traditional material,” she said, adding how working with raw material like copper or clay can be a time-consuming process, unlike butter, which, “can be used very fast.”
“It’s a fast medium. It has something — a quality to it — that’s very attractive, with a kind of a golden hue.”
Is that part of the reason fairgoers find butter sculptures so appealing? For years, several state fairs across the country, including New York’s, feature them. In Iowa, sculptors have been creating a Butter Cow for the state fair since 1911.
“Butter sculptures have been around for more than 50 years,” Eva Balazs, director of marketing for Upstate Niagara Cooperative, said. “We’re happy we can put it to good use so it can be enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of people each year.”
The 55th annual New York State Fair butter sculpture, unveiled Tuesday, highlights the role of dairy products in fueling “brains, bones and bodies,” according to the American Dairy Association North East, and depicts a train conducted by a cow and carrying kids consuming dairy items like milk and cheese.
The sculpture will be on display in the Dairy Products building at the New York State Fairgrounds in Syracuse from Aug. 23 to Sept. 4 (Labor Day.)
It’s butter…what’s the big deal?
The answer to why people love butter sculptures may lie in their accessibility, in Victor’s opinion.
“People can be intimidated by fine art,” the sculptor said, adding that if the sculpture were made out of another material, like clay, public perception may view it as something that should be in a museum.
“It’s a tangible kind of thing,” he said, adding that, “a sculpture…
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