Iowa Sculptor Decides It’s Better With Butter : Exhibit: Norma Lyon has carved a life-size butter cow at the Iowa State Fair yearly since 1959. She fashions companion pieces too, ranging from Elvis to the Last Supper.

With a 5-pound glob of butter in one hand and the thumb of Jesus in the other, Norma Lyon laments over how the main figure in her Last Supper keeps getting in the way.

“I’ve knocked three fingers off of him today,” Lyon said, her graying head swaying from side to side as she reattached the thumb. “Maybe we should have saved him for last, but we thought he was too important.”

Norma Lyon, 70, is called “Duffy” by her friends but is known to most Iowans as “the butter lady.”

She has been sculpting a life-size, 600-pound butter cow at the Iowa State Fair annually since 1959.

She carved her first cow when she was pregnant with her seventh child, and she carved two other cows when she was either pregnant or recovering from giving birth to her eighth and ninth children.

“I live for it all year long,” Lyon said as she snuggled in a pumpkin-colored jacket to warm up after hours in a 40-degree refrigerated showcase. It smells like a Waffle House without the waffles.

Each day of the fair, from dawn to dusk, scores of people line up to see the display in the agriculture building, stamping Lyon’s work as a crowd favorite.

This year was no exception.

“My gosh, there are lines 20 feet deep. People are clamoring to see the Last Supper out of butter,” said Kathy Swift, fair spokeswoman.

Visitors this year included Vice President Gore, a bevy of Republican presidential candidates who had their photos taken with Lyon and her work, and an observer from Yale University’s art library, who viewed Lyon’s sculpture as an example of folk art.

Estimated attendance totals for the Aug. 12-22 fair ranged from 60,000 on opening day to 120,000 a day over the final weekend.

“It’s one of the most popular things at the fair,” Swift said. “You wouldn’t want to do away with the butter cow, ever.”

Carving a butter cow was not Lyon’s idea. The state fair has featured one every year since 1911 as a promotion for dairy products, Swift said. Before Lyon, there was J.E. Wallace, who died in 1956. Earl Dutt, the sculptor who took over for Wallace, didn’t impress Lyon.

“I saw a picture and thought I could do better than that,” said Lyon, a self-described housewife. “So my husband said, ‘Go ahead.’ ”

Lyon, who has been drawing horses since she was 8 and whose first sculpture was a horse made of snow, took a sculpting class while working on her veterinary science degree at Iowa State University.

“Wallace had a good, decent cow, with good ribs, muscles and horns,” she said, pointing to her ribs and hooking her forefingers over her head to simulate horns.

About Wallace’s successor, Lyon said his sculpture was adequate.

“It was a good farm cow, but it wasn’t a show cow,” she said.

So Lyon talked to the Iowa American Dairy Assn., which sponsored and provided butter for the cow in the 1950s. After helping carve the butter cow in 1957 and 1958, Lyon took it over in 1959.

“It looks like it has a good udder,” said Cal Heisner, a dairy farmer from Beecher, Ill., one of the hundreds of people filing past the cow at the agriculture building.

Now butter is Lyon’s preferred medium, although she has created other sculptures, including a life-size bronze cow and calf displayed at the intersection of U.S. highways 30 and 63 in Toledo, her hometown, 60 miles west of Cedar Rapids.

Lyon started carving companion pieces to the cow in 1984, starting with a horse and foal. Garth Brooks, Smokey Bear and Grant Wood’s famous painting “American Gothic,” featuring a pitchfork and two stern-faced figures in front of a farmhouse, have been carved in butter.

After suffering a stroke in May 1997, Lyon made her comeback with the traditional butter cow--and an Elvis--that had people lined up around the agriculture building.

“I’ll do it as long as my health holds up,” Lyon said. “One doesn’t know.”

This year, as a celebration of her 40th anniversary at the fair, she decided to take on her most ambitious butter-sculpting project to date--a 1,700-pound butter sculpture of the Last Supper.

Having read the biblical accounts in the books of Matthew, Mark and Luke, Lyon carved her Last Supper with the disciples around a table leaning back on what appear to be lounge chairs while Jesus stands at the head of the table with his arms stretched out, looking toward the heavens.

“The whole thing is out of our head,” Lyon said.

At least three assistants helped Lyon this year, including Darel Nixt, 19, who worked on Judas, the third disciple from Jesus in the back row. Lyon and her assistants scooped butter from 50-pound, plastic-lined boxes.

The faces are fictitious, although assistant Ruth Nixt, Darel’s mother, said the disciple in the back row looks a little like her brother-in-law.

Asked if some might find her Last Supper butter sculpture offensive, Lyon, cleaning the butter off her hands with paper napkins, replies like a true artist.

“It’s a statue, and that’s my medium,” she said.