Mark Woods: Artist returns to Mandarin to create life-size tribute to Harriet Beecher Stowe

Shortly after the old Mandarin Store and Post Office opened on a recent Friday morning, people arrived to spend some time watching what is happening inside it these days.

From 1911 to 1964, the small building on the corner of Mandarin and Brady roads was a general store, a place where locals bought goods, cold sodas, penny candy and animal feed. For the last 25 years, it has been a museum.

Now, at least for a couple of months, it also is a working art studio — the place where Brenda Mauney Councill has returned, decades after drawing pictures of Mandarin that are still sold here, to make the first life-sized sculpture in the nation of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Art often is a private endeavor, something only seen by the public after it’s finished and unveiled in some grand ceremony. But in this case, Councill has invited the public to watch her create the art, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., every Friday, Saturday and Sunday (except Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve).

Wearing a black sweatshirt with white letters that said “LOVE ART,” she sat on a wheeled stool, reached into a crockpot, grabbed some warm clay and continued adding to her latest project — one that has brought the artist back to her hometown and, in particular, to the part of town that Harriet Beecher Stowe called her winter home late in life.

“She spent 20 years here and I thought her legacy needed to be recognized in a big way,” Councill said. “I just wasn’t satisfied with a plaque on the side of the road.”

Stowe already was famous when she first came to Mandarin in 1867. Her anti-slavery novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," sold 300,000 copies within months of being published in 1852 and became the second best-selling book of the 19th century, behind only the Bible. Legend has it that when Stowe went to the White House, President Abraham Lincoln said: “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”

While there is some doubt about whether Lincoln actually said this, there is little doubt Stowe had an enormous impact on America and, while living in Mandarin and writing “Palmetto Leaves,” on Jacksonville and Florida. Her writing sparked tourism, and her continued advocacy involved education for all.

Stowe has been described as a larger-than-life historical figure. And Councill has become renowned for much-larger-than-life public art — enormous domed-ceiling murals that involve her working on scaffolding, sometimes lying on her back, high in the air. But in this case, she is back on some familiar ground and focused on accurately capturing Stowe’s real-life stature, creating a sculpture of her sitting on a bench, talking to two young boys sitting on an orange crate.

“There’s enough research that we know she was between 5-foot-2 and 5-foot-4; so that’s kind of your starting point,” Councill said of making a life-size Stowe figure. “I’m 5-2, and I think she needs to be a little bigger than me.”

It started with another sculpture

Councill’s own starting point involves growing up in Mandarin, off Scott Mill Road, and painting a watercolor of another bronze sculpture in Jacksonville: Charles Adrian Pillars’ “Life” in Memorial Park.

At age 7, that watercolor won a competition, sparking a passion for art that led to what she is doing today at age 67.

By fifth grade at San Jose Elementary, she was designing an in-ground sculpture about the history of Florida. It was installed at the school and stayed there for decades, until the cement began to deteriorate.

After graduating from Wolfson High School, she became an artist-in-residence for Duval County and the state of Florida. And she ended up on “The Today Show.”

She was working for a Jacksonville company that sold colored sand, creating sand painting designs for marketing the product. When she made a portrait of Gene Shalit, the “Today” film and book critic known for his bushy hair and huge moustache, the show flew her to New York to unveil it and present it to him.

She eventually moved to New York, opening a studio and gallery in Union Square.

She now lives in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. She recently won a national competition to design a women’s suffrage monument with statues of nine women, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, outside the Ohio state capitol.

But first she came up with the idea to return to Jacksonville.

She says that a few years ago she was re-reading “Palmetto Leaves” when she had an “a-ha moment.” She wanted to do a sculpture of Stowe in Mandarin.

Same process used for thousands of years

“We couldn’t believe it,” said Sandy Arpen, former president of the Mandarin Museum and Historical Society.

On this recent Friday morning, Arpen was among those watching Councill work in the Mandarin Store and Post Office.

“It probably would have been a lot easier for her to do this in North Carolina, where the foundry is, but we felt — and she felt – that it was so important to be able to engage the community right from the very beginning, to let them see this,” she said.

Councill was taking clay and worked on the arms of one of the boys that will be in the sculpture, answering questions and explaining some of the process — which began long before she used PVC and foam to create the armature in front of her.

It started with Councill making a small, scale model — just a few inches tall — of what the sculpture will look like. That had to go through several approval stages, including with the City of Jacksonville. The scale model now is on display in the Mandarin Museum in nearby Walter Jones Historical Park, and the museum historical society has set a goal of raising $150,000 to support the project and lock in foundry costs.

When the full-size sculpture is completed, it will be installed in a small garden between the museum and the St. Joseph’s Mission Schoolhouse for African American Children.

But that likely won’t be until late 2024 or early 2025.

As Councill added clay to the arms of one of the boys in the sculpture, she explained that using modern technology, it would be possible to take the scale model and, using three-dimensional software, have the full-size version done in an afternoon.

That is not what she’s doing.

“I’m doing it the old-fashioned way,” she said.

She explained that she’s using the “lost-wax process,” and it hasn’t changed much in thousands of years. It involves creating the clay sculpture that will be sent to the foundry, where it’s cut apart — “I don’t like being there those days,” she says — to produce a wax mold and, finally, the bronze pieces that are welded back together.

She doesn’t do this just because using the modern technology would feel like cheating. She says the old-fashioned way allows her to be constantly tweaking, getting even the tiniest details just right. She uses oil-based clay because it doesn’t completely dry. So she can keep adding and removing clay, setting aside one piece of the sculpture but coming back to it later.

“I’ll keep doing that right until it’s loaded on the truck and goes to the foundry,” she said.

As she works, a camera is mounted nearby, recording a series of time-lapse photographs. When the process is complete, this will be uploaded to YouTube and the museum’s website.

Right now she’s still working on the first of the two boys who will be sitting on an orange crate, across from Stowe on a bench. Councill had a local 7-year-old boy, a descendant of Walter Anderson — whom a park in Mandarin now is named after — pose to help her get that piece right.

The last piece will involve creating Harriet Beecher Stowe out of about 250 pounds of clay.

She says she imagines that the two boys have come from the orange groves, and Stowe is reading to them. In the orange groves, she says, the boys might’ve been different races but would have worked side-by-side and had some things in common: They were poor, illiterate and often overlooked. And the woman who wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was determined to change that.

When the sculpture is installed at the park, there will be space on the bench alongside Stowe, so people can sit by her and have their pictures taken.

She’s already planning to return each year herself, to wash and wax the sculpture, and to spend some more time in the area both she and Stowe have called home.

“I still have family in Mandarin and across the river in Orange Park,” she said. “And every time I drive down Mandarin Road, it's still a very special feeling.”

mwoods@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4212

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Artist creating Harriet Beecher Stowe bronze sculpture in Mandarin