Stell and Shevis

It was forever ago, as they like to say, when they first met. It was the Depression and they "married on nothing," the husband of 60 years said, sitting at his kitchen table holding a cracker heaped with parsleyed tuna.

Shevis turned 90 in April and Stell is 89. In the great expanse of their union since they laid eyes on each other while painting majors at the Massachusetts College of Art, they traveled to Mexico many times. Together they have lived in Massachsetts and Belmont, and now in Camden 24 years.

In college, Stell said, the men were all called by their last names, and the women by their first. She said she learned Shevis' first name close to when they got married.

"Don't call him William," she said in a cautioning tone. "I think they called him Willy in Scotland as a little boy. But his name is Shevis."

Back then, given the politics of the day, there wasn't much of an opportunity for artists to survive. There simply wasn't a market. But the two did what they could, making art anyway. Their first house was a converted chicken coop. Stell shook her head when thinking about how, when her cat brought home kills of rabbits, she could have used it for food. "I just didn't think of it - oh, it was hard back then, very hard," she said.

Stell came to do enamel work much later, when her best friend in college died and willed her a pile of supplies and tools. "I had to do something with it," Stell said with a shrug and a smile. She used to work with mainly in clay and has many old pieces in her garden (her garden is her "other big passion"). She's been at it over 30 years, melting the little plastic bits into the molten enamel, over vivid and emotionally textured glazes. The effect is enchanting, as though she's found a way to express pure pleasure. She makes fit-in-your-hand music boxes, plates, crèches, buttons and so on.

It's clear that aging hasn't bought a halt to her creative energies; Stell just taught a master class in enameling for the Maine Crafts Association and she's shown her enamel work in several galleries in Europe and South America. She was selected for the televised 2002 first annual Studio Connections: Artists Supporting Maine PBS; she's been to countless shows at the CMCA - from craft exhibits to auctions; she's traveled to enamel society biennials in France, Spain and Guatemala; and she's even held painting groups in her house Thursday mornings for 30 years now. One could say her ambitions are more, perhaps, than a person in his or her 20s.

An accident left Shevis with single eye vision as a small child, and now he suffers macular degeneration in the other. His sight is blurry and he no longer paints or makes collages like he did just five years ago. Now he's making books, doing some memoir work and writing some playful children's stories. His ability to travel and participate in arts events has become more limited.

His paintings are executed flat, with thick outlines around figures, like Medievel secular work; they look to be more about symbol and thought than texture. They are almost like woodcuts, which he has done his share of as well. His collages are more dimensional.

Shevis mentioned an installation commission he got, to do "whatever he wanted" to a friend's staircase. He made a series of small wooden boxes going up the stairs, filled with objects - with things like little animals inside, and then wrote an accompanying children's book.

Still, like Stell, he works constantly in his home studio, where he squints at a large-type word processing screen given to him by his children, or binds some of his books. He and Stell both have their own space - inch for inch the same size - in this house they designed in the 1980s. One of their latest projects together was in 2001, when the couple decorated a bear, "ArBEARist" that who appeared in a tree, for the Belfast Bear Festival, And the Shevis duo presently has a show up at the Searsmont Library.

What is the glue that holds them together? "When we were in Mexico," Shevis said, "she threw herself at a Mexican man with the sweetest brown eyes." Though this answer seemed a non sequitor, it's not. Stell blushed and soon a copy of Shevis' book, "Stell's Dreamhouse," is produced, a nonfiction, love note of a book written 10 years ago. The story goes that a hornswaggling Mexican convinced Stell to invest in a bad deal on a house down south. In it, Shevis details her open spirit and her beauty.

"I have a lot of patience," Shevis said, in a way uniquely his, with a seemingly irascible manner that is really a gentle expression of honesty and play. "I am so patient," he said, "and I'm domesticated." He is from Scotland, and a light accent drifts into his speech now and again, nary a brogue but a lilt, and his face is tempered sweetly.

Shevis looked across at his wife Stell, whose expression - was it coy? - was set in an intimate posture, just for him. Their sense of humor accommodates how the man gruffs her, and Stell's eyes never faded in their shine, luminous with excitement - about everything, it seemed - while she kept her gaze on him, laughing.

By Shanna McNair [Volume 23, Number 4, August, 2004]

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