Food Art Pays The Bills

Jim Victor - a sculptor who studied in Europe and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts now sculpts bucolic, realistic scenes from farm life - in butter - to pay his bills. People watch him doing it through the windows of a refrigerated display case. Sometimes he tries new ideas. Santa Claus from Sorrento cheese with a spaghetti beard, cranberry and coconut hat and roasted red pepper coat, for example. He's also found new ways to use chocolate - heating and casting it in molds like bronze or spraying liquid chocolate on butter sculptures. He works food like traditional art supplies - chocolate behaving like plaster and butter like clay. Recently at a farm show, Victor sat in front of a 70-pound block of butter, slicing off slabs with the wire tool potters use lift pots off a wheel. He threw the butter slabs onto the sculpture's plywood base and pounded the butter like Play-Doh. As he worked his feet tentatively shuffled across fat-slicked floors. It gets a little tricky sometimes maintaining balance in the world of butter art. Irish Art