This is an opinion column

The Lowe Mill studio of sculptor Everett Cox is crowded with people, but only one of them is living—Cox himself. His lifelike figures stand on tables, pedestals, and benches, waiting to be finished by the artist’s hand and his process.

Cox has been a working sculptor for more than forty years, after getting his undergraduate education at Auburn and then finishing his graduate studies at the University of Georgia. In his student days, he was taught to get better at his craft each year, but he thinks the best philosophy is to make sure your work is better than it was ten years ago. It will be, if you keep at it. And he has.

While he has a home studio, his Lowe Mill studio, which looks like a garage full of figures instead of cars, is where he works each afternoon from two o’clock onward. He was invited to come to Lowe Mill by Jim Hudson, one of the owners and founders of the art center, located just off Governors on Seminole Drive.

While some of his work is commissioned, most is not. One of the lifesized figures he’s most pleased with stands not in a museum or an art gallery, but in a cemetery—Huntsville’s Maple Hill. Visitors may think she’s a family member, since she stands at one end of his family’s headstone, but she’s allegorical, Cox says. He named her “Peace and Acceptance” and says she represents just that.

He hopes she offers comfort to people. When his father died at age 91 after a painful illness, Cox wanted a statue whose presence was uplifting, not downcast or grieving. There was enough of that in cemeteries, with their solid tombstones and tiny statues of angels representing babies who had died.

Cox’s mother, now in her mid-nineties, was pleased when the statue was placed in the family plot in 2022. Cox takes her to the cemetery every other month. Sometimes visitors have placed flowers in the statue’s hands. Sometimes they’ve put a bracelet on her slender wrist. On one visit, Cox saw that his statue wore a shawl. Apparently, someone wanted to protect her from the cold wind and winter weather.

Cox is glad people interact with the figure that took a year and a half to make. Does he worry that someone might deface her? No, he doesn’t, but he says bronze statues like his are sometimes stolen from cemeteries all over the world since they’re not only beautiful but valuable as well. A few years back, a thief tried to steal a stone angel and put it in his pickup truck, but he didn’t know how heavy it was and dropped it, damaging the sculpture and making a quick getaway.

Cox has plans to create a sculpture he’ll call “The Circle of Life” and he’s made statues of women In various stages of pregnancy. When he sculpts one more, he’ll have enough to place them in a circle. The figures will all go through the same process: the model poses; he sculpts the figure; makes an armature on which to put more clay, then creates molds of the various body parts and casts the parts in bronze. He puts the pieces—an arm, a leg, a hand—back together again. Once the parts are in place and the sculpture is sandblasted, the patina is applied and it’s waxed. Then it’s ready to be installed in a home, a museum, or, in the case of “Peace and Acceptance,” in a cemetery.

Cox never asks someone to model. They come to him and talk about what he wants to accomplish. They have to be comfortable with the pose, which is a collaboration. No matter what Cox has in mind, the model’s attitude and personality come through. He hopes visitors to the Maple Hill statue see a confident young woman standing tall and looking straight ahead at the people who stop to acknowledge her or touch her hand in greeting.

Contact Beth Thames @ [email protected]