Clara’s Whimsy
Artist creates a fantasy animal kingdom
By Laura Raskin

Urbahn: “Because I’m not distracted with the face, I’m listening more to the heart. Everything works for good. Art is the medium between me and the rest of the world.”

Independent Arts Writer

Clara Urbahn uses the word “present” a lot, as in gift. She is quick to use it to describe the effects of having Stargardt’s disease, the most common form of inherited macular degeneration that meant Urbahn began to go blind in her teens.

“It was a present,” said the artist in her ‘Sconset home last week.

Not even the largest of pictures can fully capture Urbahn’s spectacular larger-than-life creations.

People’s faces are not clear and colors get mixed up, so Urbahn has had to mine her imagination for them.

Dressed all in white, with shoulder length chestnut hair, Urbahn sits with her legs tucked underneath her in a large stuffed animal chair — one of her creations.

The animal is dark and indefinable, with inviting furry arms and a head that soars above Urbahn’s.

It is one of many super life-sized stuffed animal creations that are Urbahn’s art. Some are whole animals, others are just heads or chairs. They all have glassy, warm eyes, but no two facial expressions are alike. They are not recognizably from the zoo or the farm and, instead, look as though their ancestors might have been llama or horse or camel.

“They are totally from fantasy. They’re a take-off on animals, a mix of circus and gypsy. The fun of it is that you never know what you’re going to meet,” said Urbahn in one of the studio rooms in her house, where about a dozen of the heads stand on poles and two chairs sit in the corner. They are not eerie, but have a presence: as if they are waiting for the door to close and the lights to go out to start talking amongst themselves.

Urbahn, who says she throws the clock out of the window when she is working, has undoubtedly worked many hours this winter to create 40 animal heads and three chairs with a gypsy theme for the Nantucket Atheneum’s “Circus Flora,” its major fundraising benefit of the year.

The European-style one-ring circus returns to Nantucket for the second consecutive year for four performances over the weekend of July 30 and 31. Urbahn’s creations will be the centerpieces for the July 29 cocktail reception, gala dinner and performance for 700 people.

Thirty-five of the heads will be sold at a silent auction and the chairs at a live auction.

Urbahn is a trustee of the Atheneum and volunteered last year to make her creations for the same event.

“Her strength is obviously her creativity,” said Bess Clarke, the Atheneum’s director of development. “We had no idea what they were until June (of 2004). She spent all last winter making these whimsical creations that you could never begin to imagine unless you saw them.”

“By the time the guests sat down for dinner, it was like euphoria,” said Clarke, of the combination of the circus and Urbahn’s work.

When guests requested to buy them last year, Urbahn suggested donating them for the auction this year and the proceeds will go to the Atheneum, said Clarke.

The influence for Urbahn’s flashy animals came from Guatemala, where she spent the first 10 years of her life.

“That’s where I felt a lot of color. I was influenced by my surroundings. I was in the midst of a primitive world, which I loved, and a kind of rawness, and a wonderful mother who showed me a way to look through an artistic window at everything,” she said.

Urbahn dreamt of becoming a children’s book illustrator. In her late teens, the Stargardt’s began to set it in.

“This new journey would only make my art to come a wonderful world of fantasy, through limitless imagination,” she said.

She also had dreams of going to the Rhode Island School of Design, but “in those days, I didn’t know what was going on (with the disease) and I was not able to get into RISD.”

This again, was a “present,” said Urbahn, of an experience where bitter disappointment might have turned someone else away from their passion.

“I had to explore my own style through my favorite illustrators. You cannot be totally satisfied with your work, which gives it an edge and is the magnet that draws you forward to create new stuff, until you’re finally neck and neck with your inner self,” said Urbahn.

She would go on to do illustrations, some of which hang in her studio, with a magnifying lens. “But this needed to go somewhere further,” she said. So she took her illustrations off the page and made them three-dimensional soft sculptures. She has continued to do so for 20 years.

“I didn’t think about it commercially at first. I just knew I had to create. The art could work for helping others,” she said. Her work has been in galleries, libraries and children’s museums and she receives commissions. After 20 years, Urbahn would like to move the animals into a more serious direction. “Not toy-like, but animals from another world. I’d like to explore new mediums, getting away from the stuffed animal to the world of mystic and bizarre.”

Urbahn said she could not do her work if it were not for dedicated assistants like her friend Kristy Bloomer, her “saving grace,” who make the process like an assembly line.

“My color is totally … pink is yellow, blue is green. If I stare right on at something, it isn’t there at all, just a lovely white mist. People have no faces unless I’m a few inches from them,” said Urbahn.

It’s another present, instead of a hindrance.

“Because I’m not distracted with the face, I’m listening more to the heart. Everything works for good. Art is the medium between me and the rest of the world.”

There are still more animals to be made before the Atheneum’s July event.

“I need that time,” said Urbahn. “Every day is working and meeting a new critter in the studio.”

See Clara , page 41