Virginia Sortwell Brun, known by many as Sally, died peacefully at her home in Wiscasset April 3 at the age of 100 and three months.
Until a few months ago, Sally was found daily in her studio sculpting intricately wrought figures in motion made of wire and plaster and then cast in bronze. A life-long artist, Sally had a long and impressive career, studying in Paris as a young woman in the 1930s with the French artist Fernand Leger and in New York City with the French painter and textile artist Jean Lurcat, who at the time was designing scenery for a ballet company. She also studied at the Art Students League in New York City with American painter Yasuo Kuniyoshi and later at the Skowhegan School of Art in Maine.
Over the years her work evolved from large cubist-influenced oil paintings of Maine rocks and sea to bas-relief work depicting the suffering of political refugees during the 1990s Balkan wars, to angels made from papier-mâché, to the figures she has worked on most recently.
Brun’s work was displayed at many galleries over the years, including the Leighton Gallery in Blue Hill, Atrium Gallery in Lewiston, Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland, Gallery 170 in Damariscotta, the Maine Art Gallery in Wiscasset, in a traveling art show organized by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and in a show at a gallery in Portland featuring Brun’s art with the poetry of her good friend, Maine’s former poet laureate Kate Barnes.
Sally was born Jan. 4, 1917, in Boston, the daughter of Daniel R. Sortwell and Helen Dobbins Sortwell. As a child she spent summers at her grandparents’ home, the Nickels-Sortwell House, which is now a National Historic Landmark on Wiscasset’s Main Street. Then when she was in her early teens, her parents moved the family from Boston to a dairy farm in Wiscasset that was a part of a grant made to her Foye ancestors in the 18th century.
She was predeceased by her older sister, Elizabeth Ross; brother-in-law, Jim Ross; twin brother, Daniel R. Sortwell Jr.; sister-in-law, Nancy Bascom Sortwell; and Danish-born husband, Alex Brun. She met him in Key West, Fla., in the late 1940s where she was painting and he was living on a 50-foot cruiser he himself salvaged from the sea bottom.
They married on June 24, 1950, and lived on the boat for several years. They motored it to Maine for several summers before selling it and buying a house in Nobleboro, near Damariscotta Lake. Later they sold that house and bought property in Wiscasset where they built a house that they lived in until their deaths and where Sally had her studio. Alex, who was many years older than Sally, died in 1988.
Sally is survived by nieces and nephews and their families: Wendy Ross Eichler and Tom Eichler and their sons Andy, Chris, Eddie and Eric, and Cynthia Sortwell and spouse Jessie and their daughter Sidara; Terry Sortwell and wife Melinda and their children, Joseph and Julia, and Daniel Sortwell III and his wife Claudia.
Sally will be remembered for her creativity, warmth, kindness and intelligence. She had a wide circle of friends, from the famous such as Kate Barnes and Elizabeth Bishop (both of whom dedicated poems to her in their published works) to her neighbors and their children. Having no children of her own, Sally became close to many of the children of her friends. She will also be fondly remembered by a group of caretakers who lovingly looked after her in her last few years so she could remain at home.
A memorial service will be held at a later date at the Sortwell family homestead in Wiscasset, where an exhibit of her work took place in 2011.
In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in her name to the Lincoln County Animal Shelter, P.O. Box 7, Edgecomb, ME 04556; or Wiscasset Public Library, 21 High St., Wiscasset, ME 04576.
To extend online condolences, please visit hallfuneralhomes.com.
Hall’s of Boothbay has care of the arrangement.
