Bécu created Spirit of the Marsh “to be a peaceful and benevolent presence.” 2011, Addison black granite, approx. 4½' x 4½' x 2'. Photo by Jesse Salisbury courtesy Schoodic International Sculpture Symposium
In the dead of this past winter, sculptor Lise Bécu’s home in Tenants Harbor on the St. George Peninsula offered a cozy retreat from the chill outside. Seated at a table in the kitchen, Bécu recounted her life in sculpture, starting with humble beginnings in the town of Chandler on another peninsula, the Gaspé in Quebec, Canada. Through study, skill, and determination, she became a beloved and acclaimed carver of stone, represented today by several of Maine’s best-known galleries.
Lise Bécu and her stunning Mother Totem on a sunny winter day in Tenants Harbor. 2016, granite, 8' x 16" x 8". Photo by Carl LittleBécu is a brilliant animalier, an artist of animals. Her creatures include all manner of birds, plus rabbits, turtles, snakes, and an elephant. Each one has character, its features etched with a benevolent and loving hand. A cat curls into itself; a colorful trout swims by, open-mouthed; a horned bison grazes.
The sculptor goes with the flow, letting the subject emerge from the contours of the chosen stone. Watching the PBS documentary about Leonardo da Vinci, she found alignment with what the Renaissance artist said about having to practice seeing familiar forms in unfamiliar places. “That’s how I work,” she said.
Among Bécu’s signature pieces are sculptures that combine figures, usually female, with an animal, often a bird. In Mother Totem, a stunning granite piece that stands 8 feet tall, a crested peacock perches atop a woman, one of its claws gripping her shoulder. The graceful stonework and the heartfelt nature of the presentation give the sculpture a sacred quality.
Bécu considers Spirit of the Marsh, carved at the 2011 Schoodic International Sculpture Symposium in Prospect Harbor, to be her most ambitious work and the most exciting piece she has ever made. Working with fellow sculptor and symposium founder Jesse Salisbury, she extracted a black granite boulder from the Pleasant River Quarry in Addison and transformed it into a stunning representation of a figure cradled in the wings of a great blue heron.
Bécu has a special passion for birds. Snowy Owl, 2024, gneiss stone, 9" x 16" x 12". Photo courtesy Courthouse Gallery Fine Art
“We are totally intertwined with nature,” Bécu has said apropos this piece, which is permanently sited by a marsh in Addison. She chose the heron as a symbol of skill and patience. “I also like that the Iroquois people considered it an omen of good luck,” she has noted.
A number of stone walls run through the 3-acre lot Bécu shares with her husband, musician, boatbuilder, and fisherman Robin Elliott. These walls supply material for her sculptures as does a vein of basalt in the area. From time to time, someone will bring her a stone or she’ll see one at a neighbor’s and ask for it. She has also found stones along the road and on the coast.
Bécu is a brilliant artist of animals. Cat (Sleeping), 2023, basalt, 11" x 6" x 8". Photo courtesy Caldbeck Gallery
Bécu prefers hard stone, but on occasion will work in alabaster and limestone. She doesn’t mind if the stone is beat up. “To me,” she explained, “there’s a certain beauty in the cracks and wear.”
The sculptor works on several pieces at a time, moving from one to another. “You need to stop, step away,” she noted, adding, “You don’t see it anymore if you look at it for too long.” On a February day she had several works in progress, including a first for her: a woman with a lobster.
Growing up in Quebec, Bécu recalled, there was little art in the schools. For several years, she received guidance in painting and illustration through the Famous Artists School. She had pleaded with her mother to buy a subscription from a door-to-door salesman. “My mother always said that’s where she made her mistake,” she recalled with a laugh. Founded by members of the Society of Illustrators in New York City, the school provided critiques of monthly assignments through the mail.
Bison, 2011, granite, 15" x 5" x 11". Photo courtesy Caldbeck Gallery
As a youngster, Bécu often went to church where the services were long and in Latin. “There wasn’t much to do but look at the art,” she recalled. “My favorites were the 12 Stations of the Cross carved by Médard Bourgault.”
Bourgault (1897-1967) was a founder of the École de Sculpture Sur Bois in Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, Quebec. After briefly attending the college-level Cégep de Rivière-du-Loup—she spent most of the time in the art studio—Bécu enrolled in this school of traditional wood sculpture where she studied with the founder’s nephew, sculptor Pierre Bourgault. She loved carving in wood. She also remembers being drawn to Inuit art at the Hudson’s Bay Company store.
While at the school in the mid-1970s, Bécu met Steve Lindsay, a sculptor from New York. The two married and moved to Maine in 1977. They lived with their two daughters in a house across from the Wildcat Quarry in Tenants Harbor. “There was a lot of stone carving tools left behind,” Bécu has recounted, “so I started banging on stone.” She was glad to shift to stone as wood would eventually crack or rot—or attract carpenter ants as one of her pieces once did in Judith Leighton’s gallery in Blue Hill.
Bécu’s first stone carvings were “barely etched” because “it was so hard to get into that granite,” she recalled. Nowadays she has grinders with “great big diamond wheels,” a far cry from the hammer and chisel she started out with.
Turtle, 2024, granite, 4" x 7" x 8". Photo courtesy Caldbeck Gallery
In 1979 Bécu studied at the Arts Students League in New York City with Sidney Simon, one of the founders of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She was also his studio assistant. Further practice took place in 1986 and 1987 when she rented studio space with Joan Esar who ran the Atelier Sculpt at the University of Quebec, Montreal. She later participated in cultural exchanges in Finland and France.
Maine sculptors Bernard Langlais, Clark Fitz-Gerald, Jane Wasey, Cabot Lyford, and others inspired Bécu to pursue her carving art. Langlais’s studio assistant Bill Coyne (1950-2020) gave her a place to stay in Brooklyn while she was taking classes at the Art Students League.
From 2005 to 2010, Bécu spent winters in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico, about half way between Albuquerque and Santa Fe. She recalls the hot springs and dining on trout caught in a nearby river. She befriended several artists, including acclaimed Chippewa sculptor Rollie Grandbois (1954-2016).
Bécu has done her own mentoring over the years. She mentions a neighbor, Noah Bly, whom she has known since he was a baby. When he started making knives as a teenager, she suggested he work on a forge. After going to school to become a mechanic and working in his father’s shop, he started Ridge Forge Metalworks. “He’s got more work than he can handle,” she reported with pride in her voice.
A masked Bécu working on Men and Birds in a Boat, 2011. Photo courtesy Courthouse Gallery Fine Art.
Although best known as a sculptor, Bécu has always painted and drawn. Today, some of those works are stored away in an upstairs room of her Tenants Harbor home.
In the mid-1990s while living in Portland, Bécu helped paint the scenic backdrops for The Nutcracker after they built a new stage for the Merrill Auditorium. She is nostalgic for those days when “you could live somewhere on a handshake.”
Recently, Bécu has been making remarkable collages using recycled magazines. These works in progress—“far from finished,” she noted—remind her of the stained glass windows in her childhood church.
This new art avenue is due in part to the wear and tear Bécu has experienced as a sculptor. “The actual carving isn’t bad,” she explained, “but the moving the stone around—it’s so heavy.” While not ready to hang up her stone-working tools, she is exploring other means to satisfy her creative desires.
When not making art, Bécu plays the fiddle. For a number of years, she performed with her husband, a country blues guitarist, who at age 7 studied classical music with Elizabeth Riley (1910-2016), a protégé of Andrés Segovia. These days she teams up with Rosey Gerry, a woodcutter from Lincolnville, to perform traditional country, rock tunes, and singalongs in libraries, farmer’s markets, churches, and other venues.
Bécu’s first instrument was a $50 fiddle purchased at Elmer’s Barn in Cooper’s Mills in 1980. A German-made violin dating from 1860 and a made-in-Maine mandolin were gifts from friends. Her sculpture Mandolin Player might be a self-portrait.
The house in Tenants Harbor is filled with art, including paintings by Elliott’s father, James Elliott, who was director of the Portland School of Fine and Applied Art. Bécu’s small ceramic and terra cotta sculptures line a shelf, and there’s a drawer full of her ideas for children’s books.
The surrounding property doubles as a sculpture garden. With snow on the ground, carved animals and figures stand out here and there against the winter landscape. Several out buildings serve as workshops for her and her husband. Bécu tends to move indoors in the winter, but once it gets over 40 degrees, she’s back outside, ready to turn a piece of stone into a work of enduring art.
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Carl Little’s most recent publications are Blanket of the Night: Poems and the monograph John Moore: Portals. He lives on Mount Desert Island.
For More Information
Lise Bécu is represented by the Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland, Courthouse Gallery Fine Art in Ellsworth, and June LaCombe Sculpture in Pownal.
