Sculptor of inner rhythms.

• Author: Tanguy, Sarah
• Position: Margot Schnitzer de Neuhaus

It would seem that making wood sculpture is the destiny of artist Margot Schnitzer de Neuhaus. Indeed, her maiden name, Schnitzer, means woodcarver. Neuhaus begins her daily ritual with nature by taking the slow route to her studio along the rolling wooded hills of Rock Creek Parkway in Washington, D.C. There she has time to absorb the changes in seasons, the chance accidents, and the grand rhythms. Once nestled in the peaceful solitude of her studio, the artist is ready to meditate on her neat piles of twigs, wood, bark and stone. These materials act as her "bridge" with nature: "I feel as one with them...I like to order the materials into simple shapes and patterns that repeat themselves with slight variations."

The daughter of European refugees, Neuhaus was born in 1945 in Mexico City, where she spent her childhood. When she was a teenager, her family moved to the United States and in 1968, Neuhaus graduated from the University of Illinois with a B.A. in psychology and a minor in philosophy. She went on to get a masters in psychiatric case work from the University of Chicago two years later. Shortly thereafter, she landed her first job working with emotionally disturbed children in Chicago. During this period, she found herself doodling. Over and over again, she sketched the same organic shape, always in three dimensions with an opening at one side. After searching in vain for a plastic realization of this form at a neighborhood art fair, she decided to make it herself. She enrolled in a night course at the Evanston Arts Center in 1974, and produced her first piece in cement using a clay mold.

From doodling, Neuhaus entered what she calls her dark period. While enrolled at the Escola de Artes Visuis in Rio de Janeiro from 1976 to 1979, she spent most of her time working out an obsession. "I couldn't stop myself," she recalls. "I would sit in the corner, my back to the class, [making] monstrinhos"--little clay figures the size of her palm. Neuhaus remembers how these grotesque figures frightened her. They seemed to possess a life of their own and Neuhaus fashioned hundreds of them. As time went on, their features became more refined until finally, she no longer felt compelled to make them.

The artist's 1991 exhibit at the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, D.C., is a far cry from the monstrenos of the late 1970s. Neuhaus created an outdoor/indoor show around the theme of the forest. For nine months, she analyzed the essential...