Give It Away

My mother has given away as much sculpture as she has sold in her eighty-plus year career. And she did sell quite a lot: in clay, wood, bronze, and stone, through galleries and commissions.

Ellen and I have 16 of her sculptures in our house and one 100-pound marble outside based on an observed moment when our daughter Cloe was about four years old sitting, knees up, in a wicker chair with a huge towel wrapped around her head. My siblings and numerous cousins and friends – not to mention a few collectors and public spaces – have original Miriam Sheltons. 

By most measures, it has been a successful career. She sold one piece for $10,000, back when a dollar was a dollar. And she carved a 10-foot-tall redwood Christ, on commission, that got a lot of press, for a church in Southern California. But my mother has never been comfortable with the commercial side of her art. She’s always said that she wasn’t good at selling herself, which seemed to her a requirement for success in the art world, a requirement she resented. Shouldn’t the art, if it was good, sell itself?

She carved her first extremely lifelike wooden figures when she was a teenager in Berkeley. When we kids were growing up she would sometimes race into the kitchen at supper time, having completely lost track of time in her little backyard studio. We were a traditional 1950s family; Dad worked, Mom did not. Sculpture was her work, her escape, her affirmation. 

She is 97 now, sitting across from me at one of the relatives’ tables at her granddaughter Eliza’s wedding celebration. She is wizened compared to the May Queen beauty my father married in 1947, but still handsome with her thinning gray hair pinned back, her skinny frame inside a flowing kaftan dress. She lives alone, guarding her independence with a ferocity belying her years. But she doesn’t sculpt any more. We kids think it probably has to do with her failing eyesight, the macular degeneration which she has called, in confusion, her “macro dementia.” (It’s funny in the retelling in large part because she remains, much of the time, astonishingly sharp.) 

In fact, the sculptural output declined over years. The large marble and granite pieces were no longer possible after the studio space she rented burned in a Laguna Canyon wildfire. She might have continued at home, but residential codes prohibited using the air compressor she needed to drive her stone chisels. So she went back to wood and worked for years roughing out pieces with a small chainsaw. Then that became too dangerous and she returned to chisel and mallet. During this final phase, she created a series, upwards of 70 wooden figures, each about two feet tall: men, women, old, young, sailors, acrobats – each one frozen in a moment but standing, as all her people do, in balance, in anatomical truth with gravity. She called them her “Community.” 

But then even the Community stopped coming. Was it her eyes? Waning strength in her remarkably strong hands? No, she said. You’ll see, when you get old.

The buffet dinner has just been announced, and here come a line of Eliza’s millennial friends. Only they’re not lining up to eat, they are coming unbidden to pay their respects to Miriam Shelton. They’ve seen my mother’s sculptures in Eliza’s various abodes and they want to tell her how blown away they have been by them, how they’ve wanted to tell her so, and feel honored to meet her at last. 

These are genuine, not just polite, statements. The young people, like Eliza, in their thirties, are artists themselves: one is a filmmaker, others are designers and visual artists. They’ve studied, they know what they’re talking about.

As the praise rains down, in an effusive concentration I doubt my mother has ever experienced before, I wonder how much of it she is hearing. She earlier took out her “ear plugs” (another malapropism) because of the music and the general roar of the revelers. Cacophony drives her physically, painfully batty, so she took them out and handed them to me for safe keeping. Without them, she hears only a little in a quiet room, let alone in this fantastic buzz. 

The young artists lean in to voice their appreciation. My mother looks up and smiles and clasps their hands when offered, nods and says thank you, thank you. She is touched, perhaps overwhelmed, but I also see a hint of disbelief on her face. She has spent so many years, decades, armoring herself against perceived slights, and her own doubts. She knew she was good – she lights up to this day when anyone asks to have a tour of her studio – but I believe she felt underrecognized because of her commitment to representational art. In contrast to much modern sculpture, hers are recognizable, if stylized, human forms: mothers and children, ballet dancers, circus performers, outsized stone flowers and seed pods (I have a foot-and-a-half high single iris bloom, in olive wood, on my dresser), many of them finished to a Michelangelo sheen after days, sometimes weeks, of sanding with ever finer wet/dry sandpaper.

These young people could see the work involved, the skill and the vision, and they say so. They say she is an inspiration. Then they are gone to the food line, and I say (I think she hears me): “Wow. That was really wonderful of them to say all that.” Her cheeks are slightly flushed. She is discombobulated by the hubbub, by the cocoon of not seeing or hearing well, by being far from home, where she knows where everything is, and she can touch the walls and the furniture as she shuffles by, and the Community – most of them, the ones she hasn’t given away – stand on work benches she no longer uses, each piece draped in a white plastic bag.