In honor of your birthday, I am sharing this article about you written in 04 for Informart magazine: The Magic of Mary Baxter St.Clair By J. Rose Steward I grew up in a most unusual household. From the outside it looked normal enough; a modest, 1950’s tract home nestled deep in the San Fernando Valley, it hardly warranted a second glance. But as a child who lived inside of that house, I knew some things that outsiders couldnt see: It was enchanted. Fairies played and giggled behind the roses that grew along the back fence, and our gnarled old oak tree was home to a family of small elves decked out in hats and vest of green velvet. A trap door, which for years my sisters and I tried in vain to uncover, had a staircase that led deep into the ground where it opened to a cavern filled to the ceiling with glittering treasures. There was a golden-haired ghost—or maybe he was an angel—with skin like china that wandered the halls some mornings and would tug playfully on my mother’s skirts as she hung laundry in the sun outside. We even had a witch living in our chimney who would catch us off guard as we passed the fireplace on dull, rainy afternoons. Since my mother took this all in stride, so did we. After all, most kids knew about Santa and the tooth fairy, it was just that we had a little more going on at our house. (“What do they do with those teeth, anyway?” I would ask my mom. “Well, as you know, tooth fairies are very small,” she would reply casually, “they carve them into shoes, of course.”) Speaking of my mother, Mary Baxter St. Clair, as she is known to most, her playful creations have enjoyed tremendous commercial success over the last decade, ever since she started translating her vivid imagination onto canvas. People constantly respond to her work with questions about where she comes up with her inspiration, and all I can do is reply with a grin and a shrug of my shoulders. After all, for the past forty years I haven’t just admired her imagination; I have lived it. Her take on the world is as comforting and familiar to me as her musical voice. Even as a babe I was surrounded by murals she painted on the walls of our nursery, glorious, verdant trees rising into the clouds where floating castles launched enchanted beings into the heavens, while the forest floor teemed with characters from every fairy tale from Sleeping Beauty to The Three Bears. Her playfulness took on new dimensions as we grew, until we found ourselves sharing our house with the creatures of her imagination as casually as we shared it with each other. “I have been seeing fairies and angels since I was a child myself,” she will gladly tell you. But as a member of a large family of conservative Catholics in the 40’s, she’s the first to admit that such subjects wouldnt have exactly been welcome conversation at the dinner table. “I was terribly shy, anyway, a bit of an oddball, who felt alone in a house full of people,” she says. “The fairies started to come to me at night and keep me company when I couldnt sleep. In fact, it didnt seem to me that I slept much at all, I just went off adventuring with my fairy friends. They would spirit me away to magical places, teach me to fly, showing me all manner of wonderful things no one else could see. This was my secret life, my secret world. The fairies became my companions, my confidants, and kept me from feeling so alone. I wasnt a kid who talked much anyway,” she adds with a bright laugh, “times sure have changed!” During the day, she says, she was an avid tree climber who spent countless hours cradled in their limbs, reading or drawing. “But I never imagined I would become an artist. I never thought of myself as being creative back then, and I certainly didnt see myself as imaginative, because I always took for granted that these nocturnal visits were real. Personally, what I really wanted was to be Tarzan when I grew up,” she says with a laugh. She began to paint when she was ten, and her first sale to the mother of a neighborhood boy spurred her on to buy more supplies. “We had a lot of artists in the family, a lot of music, but my parents vaguely disapproved of the idea of a girl being an artist of any kind, and since I was a very devout child, attending services almost daily, I think they were expecting me to become a nun or join some religious order. But then one day, as I sat in church—I think I was about eighteen—the woman in front of me was holding a baby and as I watched his sweet little face blowing bubbles over her shoulder I thought hey, I want one of those! And that was it for me.” At 23 my mother fell in love with and married my father, and she set about creating a home for her family. All the while she painted when she could, and some of my earliest memories include a fascination with her supplies: the brushes, the tubes of paint, the myriad colors on her palette, which she kept stored in the laundry room. She didn’t paint fairies then, but in her children she had found kindred spirits with whom she could share her magic world, and we were eager to come along. “My fairies were too fragile to expose to a world that might not accept them. But then my babies reminded me so much of my childhood friends, their sweetness, their innocence and delight; the two worlds just seemed to merge naturally. I used to find you in your crib giggling for no apparent reason, and it occurred to me that you might be seeing the same things I had been seeing since I was a child.” Filling our home and our lives with wonder, my mother never missed an opportunity to point out the magic around us, from the still and majestic confidence of an old oak tree, to the way the wind would play symphonies in the tall grasses of the rolling hills. “I wasn’t trying to do anything consciously, except to make fun for us,” she says, “I needed magic and I thought you did, too. You kids were my life and my fun and I needed to share what was most precious, most secret, and that was the world of wonder. You were so readily able to see all that before had existed only in my mind. Sharing that with you was one of my greatest joys.” She still laughs about our reaction to the “Witch in the Chimney”, an illusion accomplished with the help of a vacuum hose inserted into the back of our fireplace. “I would come back inside and find you guys jumping up and down, wide-eyed and hollering “The witch is back!” I would peer in and say no, I can’t see anything, all the while trying not to burst into laughter.” The years passed, and life would change, in some ways dramatically. When my parents’ marriage failed, life became harder, and while there would be less talk of the fantasies of childhood, my mother’s spirit continued to prevail over every hardship, transforming even the most stressful situations into “just another adventure”. Even as she struggled to support us doing clerical work, she seemed determined to teach us to live without limitations, to imagine the possibilities. “There is nothing in this world you cannot do.” She would tell us. All the while she continued to paint, her seascapes and portraits adorning the walls of our apartment making us look better off than we really were, the ever-present vase of brushes and turpentine in the sink, her collection of ribbons for First Prize and Best of Show from small local contests growing larger every year. She adopted the name “St. Clair” from her hometown in Michigan and signed her paintings with it, and even found the time to attend a few art classes. By the late ‘80s my sisters and I were grown and off on our own, and that was when my mother met Bruce. They married and soon he had whisked her off to the Island of Kauai to start a new life. “I found myself in a big house where he had set aside a whole room as a studio for me to paint in, and paint I did, all day, most every day.” The support of her new husband combined with the soft, fragrant breezes of the islands and the almost daily appearance of rainbows began to stroke her imagination in the same ways her children had done year earlier. “We would be walking along the beach and in the emerald green waters I could almost see the mermaids playing hide-and-seek under these large formations of volcanic rock. I would rush home and try to capture them on canvas.” Her first sale of a fantasy painting was, in fact, of a mermaid, “I had to talk the gallery into taking it,” she said, “they were skeptical of the public’s interest in such a thing, but it did sell, and soon they were asking for another, and then another.” Emboldened by this success, my mother dared to hope that the world might finally be ready for her fairies. In 1991 she painted “Le Fleur Enchante”, put it into print, and bought a small ad in an art magazine. To her delight, the first run sold out quickly, and she invested the profits into a larger ad. Before she knew what was happening, “Enchanted Island Studios” was born, and she found herself hiring agents, learning to run a business, putting her recently retired husband to work as her manager, even getting her grandchildren to act as models. “The world has changed so much since my children were young. It has, in many ways, grown harder and more cynical, yet at the same time, more receptive to—or perhaps more in need of—fantasy. Just 15 years ago, hardly anyone was interested in this kind of art; now the genre is remarkably popular. I have received so many letters from kindred spirits who say they see the fairies, too, and it is such an inspiration to me. Sure, there are those who don’t understand how important magic is in this life, that it is as such a part of nature as we are. They need proof that something is real before they will allow themselves to appreciate it. But these things are very fragile, very perishable. They must be treated tenderly and with respect, they can’t survive disbelief or too much questioning. It’s like taking a clock apart. It just won’t work anymore.” For my part I am reminded by all of this of the kind of advice she used to give me whenever I was going through something difficult or painful, like the first time my heart was broken. “Love is like a child you send out into the world,” she said. “And it is no less precious just because it had been rejected.” As I grow older, I find myself exploring the value of what my mother has taught me, and to me her imagination, so familiar, seems less like magic and more like wisdom, a wisdom she communicates now with the strokes of a brush rather than a whisper in my ear. A wisdom that teaches eternal optimism, that teaches us to go beyond our limitations and succeed where others have failed. My mother will tell you that imagination makes life fun, makes life beautiful, that magic can strengthen you…but in a very real way, the ability to see things that are not there, to see beyond the obvious, the ability to imagine, can save a person’s life in more ways than one. And while she may not be quick to admit, I know that is the real reason she paints fairies.
Posted on: Mon, 08 Dec 2014 16:21:44 +0000
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