In antiquity, it was said that philosophers...

In antiquity, it was said that philosophers were honored everywhere except in their own countries.

Today, we can say that artists are honored everywhere except in their hometowns.

A case in point is Deborah Butterfield.

Who?

She is a mature artist with a distinctive vision, a distinguished exhibition history and an international reputation.

Her works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Washington’s Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, to mention a selected few.

The artist is a native of San Diego. She grew up here and attended both San Diego State University and UC San Diego but completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at UC Davis.

Butterfield has never received any substantial attention from San Diego museums, galleries or collectors.

Until now!

An enlightened collector has taken the lead.

Rob Lankford, developer of the award-winning Regents Square complex in the Golden Triangle, has added two Deborah Butterfield sculptures to the works of art exhibited in the lobbies of Regent Square I and the new Regent Square II.

Both sculptures represent life-size horses, one standing, the other lying down. They are not realistic, but symbolic. Though nothing more than armatures made of scrap metal, they evince Butterfield’s magical ability to convey the essence of “horseness.”

Horses have been a passion of Butterfield’s since childhood and the source of her imagery since she became an artist.

“I started horseback riding before I started talking,” she said recently, speaking from her part-time home in Hawaii.

Her love for horses led her to begin studying for a career in veterinary medicine. After having started her college education in San Diego, Butterfield transferred to UC Davis. But there she changed her major to art.

“I didn’t have the spine to be a vet,” she said. “I couldn’t face putting people’s pets to sleep.”

She developed under the guidance of three major contemporary artists: ceramist Robert Arneson and painters William T. Wiley and Roy DeForrest.

“I decided my life on who I wanted to be like,” she said. “As an artist, I could incorporate both worlds into my life.”

Butterfield first used horse images as metaphors for herself. They were a way for her to make self-portraits without referring directly to herself.

But her attitude has changed.

“My art is about horses and it isn’t. It’s really about art,” she said.

In the past Butterfield has used plaster on armatures, then later mud and sticks to fashion her equine sculptures. Now, she is using found materials.

“There are great dumps in Hawaii!” she said.

Butterfield and her spouse, John Buck, also a successful sculptor, think of Montana as home. They thrive in its demanding environment.

“Montana is like life and death,” Butterfield said. “It is isolated, but my inspiration comes from landscape and emptiness. I couldn’t go back to San Diego.”

But thanks to Rob and Susie Lankford, a part of the artist is now here where she first began to develop her artistic vision.

“We pursued her work for two years after first seeing it at the Fuller Goldeen Gallery in San Francisco,” Susie Lankford said. “We finally got our pieces from the Edward Thorp Gallery in New York after begging him to let us have first choice after the museums took their pick from her show there in January.

“We love horses and raise thoroughbreds ourselves. Butterfield has captured their natural elegance, which works in our spaces. There’s an architectural dimension to her work. We’d like to think of our project as having artistic merit and being a credit to the community.”

It does and it is. And it honors a native artist.

The Bullmoose Group, whose members include San Diego artists Stuart Burton, Eric Christian, Tom Frankovich and Allan Morrow, are exhibiting works at two sites, Rogue Gallery (3803 Ray St.) and Standard Brands Art Corner Gallery (939 16th St.).

The most successful of the artists is Allan Morrow, who uses the imagery of highways, streets and even parking lots in paintings that challenge our perceptions of them as representations and as abstractions.

The inventive Tom Frankovich tries everything, not always successfully. His “Gridiron Series” of wall reliefs (at the Rogue Gallery only), however, is innovative and surprisingly handsome.

The works are composed of a variety of kitchen implements, such as a cake rack, pressed into masses of pigment on black and white plexiglass supports. Eric Christian also turns his hand to a variety of art forms and styles, most satisfyingly in his traditional ceramic vessels.

The sinisterness of Stuart Burton’s wall masks, which look like mummies’ faces, is mitigated by the playful South Seas images he paints on them. But the strongest is the simplest and most effective--a large unadorned white mask, which is unmitigatedly spooky.

Both exhibitions continue through April 26.

The Natalie Bush Gallery (908 E St.) is exhibiting collage prints by Elaine le Vasseur. Entitled as a group “Fantastic Planet,” they are luscious imaginary landscapes, the most successful of which feature large tree forms in the foreground.

The resourceful artist makes them by recycling pieces of prints (lithographs, serigraphs, etchings), which she sews together and paints.

They are pleasantly inventive decorative pieces.

The exhibition continues through April 18.