Mound of Butter

Mound of Butter, oil on canvas, 19 3/4 x 24 in. 1875

Mound of Butter by Antoine Vollon is one of a handful of paintings I always make a point to see during my visits to the NGA. I first saw the painting several years ago while visiting the NGA's permanent exhibition, Small French Paintings. I remember walking among the seascapes, flowers and fruit etc, all beautiful, and stumbling upon... a big mound of butter. I read the label and, sure enough, it said "Mound of Butter." I laughed because, really, what else could the title be? It's a mound of butter.

Butter is a subject only a painter could love. It isn't particularly pretty or appetizing (and as a "mound" it is mildly repellent) but Vollon smears a swath of greasy, yellowish paint onto the center of the canvas and transforms it into something wonderful.

Mound of Butter is a simple composition. A mountain of butter, rising out of a wrapper, sits in the center of the canvas with what appears to be a wooden knife in it. Two eggs sit next to the mound and serve to set the scale of the butter. The butter itself seems like it could be warming a bit. For some reason I imagine/sense the knife sliding down the side.

Like many good paintings, Mound of Butter comes very close to being a bad painting. It is on the verge of turning into little more than a mass of smudges and slathers of paint and, for me, part of the thrill comes from seeing the painting teeter precariously on the edge of disaster. The painting looks as though it was painted in 2o minutes (there are few passages where the brush approaches anything slower than a fast slither) so it is all the more amazing that the paint goes exactly where it needs to go and with just the right touch.

At the end of a long day in the studio I will sometimes make a quick oil sketch using the leftover paint on my palette before going home. Because I'm tired and unconcerned with outcomes I become open to all painterly possibilities and am not afraid to leave well enough alone those passages made without planning or forethought (in other words I enter a state of mind I should always be in when I paint.) Mound of Butter feels like an end-of-the-day painting to me. How many painters would not go back in and fuss with this passage or that: to solidify that knife handle, to adjust those eggs a bit, to define the material in the wrapper, to add a few glistening effects to the butter etc. until the paint was under control (i.e. totally lifeless?)

This painting is not a particularly true representation of nature. Indeed, if you brought Vollon's still life objects into the real world, the knife would break with the lightest stress, the eggs would feel like lumps of bread dough, the butter would be weightless and the wrapper would tear like cotton candy. Instead, what Vollon has done is create entirely new and wonderful substances. For instance, what is that wrapper made of? Linen? Paper? Silk? I have no idea and I don't care. It is not quite cloth and not quite paint. It is some third thing. Vollon weaves a kind of liquid pearl (or perhaps solidified smoke) and swirls it into folds and slithers it gingerly around the base of the butter. It is strangely sensual (my friend Kell Black calls this kind of paint "sexy paint.") I suppose any painting that emphasizes the tactile qualities of paint or the touch and response of the brush could be called sensual to some degree. It is one thing, however, to paint a sexy oyster, and something else entirely to paint a sexy mound of butter.