Cat Scratch Fever: The Contagious Scratchboard Art of Sally Maxwell
June 11, 2020
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Sally Maxwell creates grand illusions that bring the feel of wildness to life.
Sally Maxwell wanted the spine-tingling growl of Ursus arctos horribilis—or at least the sensation of the great bear’s warning cry—to carry across a room.
Of course, it’s one thing to accomplish this desire audibly; it’s quite another to communicate it in visual two dimensions. Yet in living rooms and offices across the country, such Maxwellian calls of the wild are sounding, and they are causing people to stop and gaze in astonishment.
Maxwell is among a group of fearless visionaries now taking wildlife art by storm in the 21st century. Even she, however, couldn’t have predicted that one of her most career-defining works would emerge from the chaos of a hurricane.
That’s exactly what happened in 2017 with Maxwell’s massive portrayal of a grizzly, titled Imminent Doom, that stands six feet tall.
Last summer, the Texas artist and her husband, George, were on vacation in New England exploring their favorite haunts along the coast. Meanwhile, back in the Lone Star State, Hurricane Harvey came screaming ashore off the Gulf of Mexico, bringing torrential rains and flooding to the inland community where they live on a nature preserve they created. It’s a retreat, situated in the triangle between Houston, Austin and San Antonio, that has attracted everything from wild hogs to monster whitetail bucks and a hundred different species of birds.
Although Maxwell’s studio managed to stay high and dry—and fortunately along with it a stack of original works and studies that are irreplaceable—her husband’s business was left submerged under eight feet of water that swelled over the banks of the Colorado River.
“You feel helpless,” Maxwell says. “You realize there are things you can control and others you can’t.” It’s a mantra that also applies to her devotion to wildlife conservation.
As an artist who has gained international recognition for her African subjects— especially big cats—Maxwell has been commanding even greater notice of late for portrayals of North American mega-fauna. She was in the midst of designing an homage to grizzlies, carefully plotting how she would approach the composition when Hurricane Harvey jolted her psyche.
“We didn’t know if we’d return to Texas and find our place in ruins,” she said. “That’s when the bear piece kind of morphed from being about a riled grizzly defending his terrain to a piece that reflected our own angst and the dynamic tension that exists between humans and nature.”
Art, Maxwell says, has always been a form of personal therapy.
Imminent Doom was an expression of catharsis. Another cathartic bear piece, Be Bear Aware—a commentary about Russia as a menace to American democracy—sold soon after reaching the gallery in Wyoming.
While Maxwell’s pieces are acclaimed for their anatomical precision, which is a direct reflection of her exquisite draftsmanship, her works hold deeper metaphorical meaning, often reflecting circumstances that humans find themselves in. And that’s what makes them delightful conversation pieces, coveted by hunters and non-hunters alike.
They emanate a presence, whether hanging in a trophy room or the grand foyer of a trophy home. At first glance, casual art observers might have difficulty pinpointing exactly Maxwell’s medium. Engaging and brash, exuding spirit, her creations don’t merely loom large, they have a halting effect. They cause you to contemplate the power that an animal projects.
For some collectors, Maxwell is their first introduction to scratchboard, a tedious illustrative technique that uses sharp knives and tools to leave an engraving on a thin layer of white China clay coated with dark, often black India ink.
Maxwell became a maverick when she began bestowing her creations with color.
“I think Sally has absolutely, unequivocally helped move scratchboard beyond its traditional reputation of being kind of a staid black and white medium,” says Elaine Salazar, chief executive officer of Ampersand Art in Austin, Texas says. “That’s why she stands in a place of her own. In some ways, she’s a pioneer.”
Salazar notes that Maxwell has innovated the visuals of scratchboard in a contemporary way, which makes it appealing to both old-school art collectors and those of an emerging younger generation. Like Bob Dylan plugging his electric guitar into an amp and shaking up audiences at the Newport Folk Festival, Maxwell has pushed boundaries.
“She understood how the integration of color could transform scratchboard into something fresh, the same way other painters started new movements. No question, she has evolved the scratchboard medium,” Salazar says, adding that she was first drawn to Maxwell’s vividly-hued Georgia O’Keeffe-like florals, though most collectors are riveted by her portraits of animals.
Maxwell’s larger compositions, some measuring four or five feet across that take months to complete, have attracted praise from influential collectors who are designing rooms around them.
“Everyone who comes to our house falls in love with her paintings,” says Sonia Solt in Houston, who together with her husband own nearly five dozen Maxwell originals and lithographs.
The couple in recent years has lent a few of Maxwell’s masterworks to be part of international museum tours. In 2016 when her book, Sally Maxwell: Scratching The Surface, was published, fans lined up nearly a block long to get a signed copy.
In the foreword, artist John Banovich writes, “Sally’s artworks are not your average artistic creation; they are inspirational masterpieces.”
Born in 1946 in Monmouth, Illinois, Maxwell had an early career as an illustrator/graphic artist in advertising. She found success in the late 1970s with her original art and several popular limited-edition prints sold through the company she founded, Rennaissant Gallery Prints. Her work also was featured at Marshall Fields department store in Chicago, a remarkable feat given that she was also raising young children.
In 1988, she began a series of scratchboard pieces focused on African game animals. A decade later, she was enlisted by Salazar at Ampersand to create how-to kits for teaching scratchboard, which sold thousands of copies. In a way, generations of scratchboard artists around the world got their start thanks to Maxwell’s tutelage. A decade later, in 2007, Maxwell debuted new works at Dallas Safari Club and the response from collectors was immediate.
Ever since Mountain Trails Galleries in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and Park City, Utah, began representing Maxwell in 2016, her work has created a buzz with both wealthy and famous residents there as well as jet-setting visitors passing through, says gallery fine art consultant Lee Catt.
“The most common response is how lifelike her animals are and how much detail she is able to capture,” Catt says. “A lot of people initially think her paintings are photographs, and then, when they step forward, they see real fur, whiskers, claws and fangs growing right out of the surfaces. But it’s just part of the wonderful visual illusions she creates.”
Most people are astounded, he says, when they realize how much time, effort and thought Maxwell puts into each piece, whether it’s a little six-by-six-inch gem or much bigger, more ambitious piece like a 48 by 48.
Not long ago, one of her bruin images went to reside in the private collection of a corporate CEO in Chicago while a retired global media executive commissioned Maxwell to deliver a scratchboard portrait of his beloved dog.
“Sally conveys the value of wild animals in a human-dominated landscape,” adds Banovich. “The animals are better off and so are we.”
It is Maxwell’s hope that animal art makes people more empathetic.
“Throughout history, artists have helped enlighten the public to injustice,” she says. “For endangered species, today’s wildlife artists have taken up the mantle. When it comes to the plight of many species, like the black rhino, I believe that sometimes merely depicting them and inviting conversation about their situation can have profound effects.”
Rather than preaching conservation at people, which almost never works, Maxwell says art can help awaken viewers to issues they might not otherwise consider. She is a believer that because of humankind’s archetypal relationship with other species going back to the time when Homo sapiens first walked the earth, that deep in our subconscious is a universal sense of “animal magnetism.”
Hunters know it by looking into the eyes of the animals they pursue for sustenance. Maxwell doesn’t know if non-human creatures possess a soul, but they do have emotional ranges and sentient awareness that involves a highly developed way of interacting with their surroundings and each other. She tries to communicate individual personalities of her subjects.
“Sally puts a lot of herself and the world around her in many of her pieces,” Solt explains. “These pieces of art are our trophies. They don’t just give a moment in time captured in a posed animal, but there is a magnetism that draws you in and a glimpse into the life of that animal and its surroundings.”
Foremost, each piece serves up a daily encounter with nature accessible even to those who dwell in cities. They can inhabit a tranquil sunset or have the hair on the backs of their necks rise viscerally from standing beside a predator, delight mirthfully in the artist’s sense of humor, or seek solace in an image intended to evoke thoughts of the sacred.
“Her work enables us to escape, but more than that, she allows us to bring these animals into our lives where we can think about them,” Solt adds. “When we think about them, we care, the same way Sally does.”