Leah Poller Story

STORY

I was the youngest of four children. My father was the first syndicated cartoonist in the US (and a Sunday oil painter)  and my mom dreamed of being a milliner but instead sewed beautifully for everyone in the family and didn't stop until she was in her mid 90s. Creativity, seeing things made from scratch, was a family value in my childhood.

They loved food too, so cooking and feeding anybody who came to the front door was a carryover from the hunger they experienced during the depression. Growing up in America in the 50s was promising - hard work paid off and with great entrepreneurial energy the family's fortunes increased as did its mobility.

Wunderlust kicked in. To my good fortune, my parent's desire to see the world included dragging me along. My first trip outside the country in my teens was to Jamaica. To this very day, I remember everything vividly from the trip.

As a first generation American, my first trip to Europe felt like going home.
With a two year old in tow, my husband and I  did the grand tour (UK, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland) for five weeks. I was incurably smitten by Paris and knew that one day I would get back there again.

And I did. The post-divorce change of life, at the early murmurings of the women's lib movement in the US, led me to a summer in France to study the language “sur place”. In the company of my three minor children, the three months, surprise of surprises, turned into 20 years and Paris became home. (For an uncanny version similar to the first part of “my story”, see the film Revolutionary Road, which came out about 2010)

Paris was emerging later than America from the horrors of the Great War. I was caught up in this incredible Renaissance and post ‘68 social revolution. Walls went down, free falling took the place of socialist security and I was welcomed in as a rare ex-pat not working for government or a US corporation.  Somewhat fluent in French, I got to accidentally hobnob with creatives expats from the world over who were motivated to contribute their talents to this exciting environment. Many went on to greatness.

To earn a living,  I did what I could in the beginning and little by little made my way into the world of Cinema, Art book publishing and trade fair organization.
Needless to say Paris was my platform - a real cloverleaf for discovering all of Europe and points beyond. It also offered an opportunity to live the dream of my youth to study art. As my own personal coup, I was able to study at the Beaux-Arts school, otherwise known as ENSBA (Ecole Nationale Superieure de Beaux Arts).

I wanted to paint but my nature was not cutout for the medium, so I ended up in the sculpture classes. After a trial by fire to earn the right to study there, my professor and lifetime mentor, Prix de Rome artist Maurice Calka personally guided my education and provided the rigorous foundation for who I am today.

You could say I had a classic, academic and experimental educations simultaneously, which is what forged my direction as a figurative realist. In fact, the breadth and depth of this interest, not to mention the extraordinary caliber of professors at the Beaux Arts, sent me  deeper and deeper into my interests, projecting me from the classics to the contemporary, hoping  to move it one yard further upfield  by fine tuning my personal form of creative expression.

Of all the art movements, and I got to deal with many of the key creatives from these movements who were still alive and well in Paris, the one that captured my curiosity, my literary inclinations and the mind and matter relationship was the surrealists.

I bore easily. I love a good challenge. If my creative work didn’t engage me intensely throughout this lifetime, I would've dropped it long ago. Instead, it feels like I am at the beginning every day.

Art became even more intense as I experienced the transition from clay to plaster to bronze. My first casting in Paris was memorable - it was like being in a casting monastery in the brotherhood of deeply committed alchemists as the liquid metal was transformed into immutable works of art, in the same surroundings that had cast Giacometti, Maillol, Miro, etc.

Maybe this is a connection to my maternal instincts. Seeing my sculpture incased in refractory plaster, disappearing completely from my eyes, and having this vessel filled in a “one shot only” manner with molten metal,  only to rediscover the work in the second state - once again demanding stern and disciplined interaction to be shaped, to remove all the rough edges, to take its place in the social environment where its message and its ability to communicate - to give it its ultimate worth - both thrilled and humbled me.  Yes, it was like “birthing” … and yes, it is about process.

Bronze is a noble material that has existed for thousands of years. How strange that it was discovered, used and has hardly changed since the beginning, so perhaps for me this is my mystical connection reaching far, far back and quite possibly going way, way forward... It is what I am about.

Balancing a life, a career, business and children taught me how to really make use of the right brain - left brain connection. How well I was able to simultaneously juggle so many needs and so many desires, internal and external, led me to discover a rich and exciting place in my brain called the corpus collosum,  that magnificent switching station that allows us to go from the creative to the pragmatic, from the mathematical to the romantic.

It became such an interesting place to hang out that I really feel ambidextrous in my ability to juggle parallel lives that open the gates to a more compassionate appreciation of my fellow man. Somewhere deep inside is my own map for getting around in this world. It includes language, imagery, people, places, food and most importantly, the experiential.

It may sound like an out of body experience but in fact it's an in body experience in which I throw my whole consciousness and physical being into what I'm doing.

Perhaps that's why being hands-on has always been my imperative. It would seem strange to hand over the real pleasure of working with the materials, creating the shapes and forms, to others. in fact, I can even jump in at the foundry and perform the tasks of chasing, polishing, patinas, etc. I've been taught by the pros in foundries in the US, Mexico, France, Italy and now in China with the world’s largest art foundry, where I am considered “family”.

When I was a kid, we were told that if you drilled a hole through the planet, you would come out the other side in the middle of China. I imagined the Chinese people dangling by their feet upside down from the earth.

If I am now in China it is thanks to my daughter who sent out a call for company from her hotel room in Shanghai where she was on an assignment for several months. I grabbed the next plane and fell in love for the second time with a city. What I couldn't predict though,  was how a small Chinese parasol made out of paper, beautifully hand painted with flowers, (a gift from a cocktail party drink from my dad)  would inform the current stage  of my artistic career with the most significant honor of being selected to exhibit as the featured artist and only foreigner in the Beijing Biennale of Female Sculptors, where my exhibition “Made in China”, garnered outstanding acclaim., all based on that little parasol.  

Part of that curiosity to travel is the sensation of opening my eyes, wide -  even wider - to take in other worlds and to prove to myself that I could understand something about who we are, what we think, and how we feel.

Quite by accident, after a double whammy of back to back accidents, I was relegated to bed, with the order not to lift anything, not to bend, etc. And thus, began a multi-year project of sculptures, more than 100, all dealing with the theme of the “Bed”, that ubiquitous object in our lives that has long been under-explored in art.

My bronze beds have been woven through my life like a common thread, offering a personal narrative in the second degree of the things I have read, places I have been, objects I have seen, people I have met. For the viewer, they are mini-theaters of human experience, universal to all.

Meanwhile, the need to do portraits never lessened.

We're all out there moving around in this huge place called the world,  but if we had to pick one spot from which to position ourselves,  the one place from which all of our sense of being starts,  I think it lies somewhere behind the eyes where the brain cells have their only exit from the cranium.  From the very beginning, there was something about a person’s eyes that pulled me in. Yes, it is the eyes and yes, it may well be the third eye.

If I could capture a person's soul and spirit, from the unique vantage point of their eyes,  if I could mirror their insides to the outside and show them three dimensionally, then I would achieve my goal in portraiture.

Doing Fred Ho's portrait was an amazing challenge. He was an extraordinary, larger than life person confronting his ultimate and approaching demise from years of struggle with a deadly disease.  He never diminished before my eyes and challenged me like no one ever did, daring me to capture his soul like one catches a dream in an imaginary net.

Our sessions were intense, time was of the essence and there was so much to say. Fred has an enormous following, a very dear, dedicated and committed coterie.  I have seen them standing before my sculpture with tears streaming, relating intimately with their Fred, who is now immortal in bronze.

Somehow the comfort of an airplane ticket in my pocket and an updated passport with a visa reminds me how small I am, how big the world is, how much there is to learn, to see and to share.

Looking back at the challenges (thriving as a single mom with 3 kids, becoming an internationally recognized FEMALE artist), the accomplishments (curating over 120 exhibitions of other artists, exhibiting my own work more than 100 times, creating hundreds of sculptures in bronze), earning the title of “Citizen of the World” ( polyglot, travels to every continent, interactions with diverse cultures) and being able to say “I did it my way” has informed my late stage career, a very solid affirmation as to the how and why of being an artist: I AM FREE.

It was never about anything else.