Flashback 2010: Silhouette artist presents profile of a gentler time

The silhouette in the foreground is from May 26, 1946, when my mother
was 9. The sculpture of an alien head is by Allen Littlefield.

     My mother's effects included several silhouettes — quite the thing back then. And I recalled that I had my own silhouette cut for a column once.  Sally Newcomb passed away just last year, at age 96.

     "Shall I do your silhouette?" asks Sally Newcomb, gesturing me into a chair in her elegant, book-filled apartment in Glenview. "Here is where the victim sits."
      I face the window, while Newcomb, a spry lady with a ready laugh and a refined manner of speaking — think Aunt May in the "SpiderMan" movies — quickly sketches my outline. I ask about her parents, Richard Southern Shreve and Mary Grey Andrews.
     "My mother was from Salt Lake City and my dad was from Virginia, and his family used to feed Mosby at the back door."
     "Mosby?"
     "Rebel raider. Once the whole family got hauled into the courthouse because they were definitely Rebel sympathizers."
     Newcomb grew up in Washington, D.C.
     "I went to a girl's junior college in Virginia where my cousin Mary Frances had gone" — she slips into a deep drawl for "Meh Frances" — "with the idea that I was going to be a Southern belle. Well, it didn't work. But I had a very good time."

Nose not to scale.

     And here she unleashes that laugh.
     "My mom had silhouettes all over the house -- she fancied them, she collected them -- so I knew what they were."
     Newcomb began cutting silhouettes out of black paper in 1956.
     "I was in the Bound Brook, New Jersey, Junior Women's Club, and they were going to have something they called the Easter Bunny Fair, and someone said, 'You take the silhouette booth.' "
     The phone rings. She steps across the room, adorned with many, many silhouettes — family members, children, both when girls were portrayed with big ribbons in their hair to girls wearing karate outfits or pulling wheeled backpacks.
     "I am being interviewed by the press," Newcomb says into the receiver. "I'm terribly sorry. I'm thrilled that you called."
     She returns, and takes up her work.
     The tool she uses is seven-inch Singer sewing shears. Not something smaller?
     "You try working with little tinies all day long, and you have nothing left of your hands. It's like a Western saddle. You use a cute little saddle for jumping and showing off. If you are going to be there all day, you want something big and comfy."
     How did she pick up the skill?
     "There was a kit that you could send for that was in the back of the New York Times magazine, and it was supposed to make everything possible, so I sent for the kit, and it was a stinker to work with, so finally I thrust it from me and just winged it. They were pretty bad, but there was no competition. So that worked out well. Now, I've got to make a delicate cut here, so I'm going to shut up for a minute . . . "
     More like five seconds. She turns the portrait so I can see.
     "What do you think of you?"
     The speed is surprising — two minutes total, maybe three. I study my profile, notice she included my new beard, and observe that she has been kind to my profile.
     "I gave up kind a long time ago," she says. "People don't want kind. They want true."
     In my experience, I point out, people want truth regarding others but kindness for themselves. Either way, I will accept her version of my nose as a form of higher truth.
     Does she ever botch one, lop the head off?
     "Sometimes, I'm not quite pleased with it, but people are."
     She gives me a tour of her apartment — or, more accurately, the silhouettes in it.
     "This was done at Greenfield Village," she says of a proud rooster. "This was local. . . . This was something I've not seen done in silhouette before. It's a mommy who was very happily throwing her infant in the air."
     Did the mom have to throw the baby a lot for her to get that? "A couple of times."
     Pets are better behaved than children
     She shows me some of her greatest hits -- five figures, characters from Mark Twain, one with a paintbrush; another, a slingshot.
     "This was one of the first ones I did for the junior women's club -- they were having a play of Tom Sawyer.
     "This is when I was visiting a family in England and did all of their livestock, including their kids," she says, showing off a tableau of animals and people, including a goat and a pony. She names the rest.
     "Gifty the dog, Porridge the cat and Petrochelli the rooster."
     Are pets a challenge?
     "They're better behaved than the kids."
     She shows me her schedule from 1989. About two-thirds of the month was filled. She has gone to England, Scotland, Denmark.
      "I worked in Copenhagen and in Fields, Dillards in St. Louis and Florida and hopped all over the place. Rochester, New York. The Museum at Stonybrook. Mystic Seaport. I pretty much peppered New England."
     Now, alas, despite the popularity of classic Americana and parents' endless desire to memorialize their children, Newcomb says this charming artform is on the wane.
     "I rode the crest of the wave when it had a revival, now it's really disappearing," she laughs.    

     "Silhouettes are at a nadir."
     But not quite gone.
     "I'm 82, and I'm tapering down," she says. "I'm going to be in Winnetka at the Harkness Outreach Center. Nov. 20" -- that's Saturday. "I'll be in Lake Forest at the Gorton Community Center Dec. 3 and 4."
     "Silhouettes have been very good to me," she says. "They've taken me all over this country, I've met some fascinating people and had a great time."

      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 19, 2010