Early years

Mary McClelland was born Mary Warner Sharpless on February 6, 1918, the youngest of three children in the Quaker family of Grace Warner Sharpless and Thomas Kite Sharpless.  When Mary was 6 years old, her father died of tuberculosis, leaving Grace to care for her three young children.  Within a few years, Grace married Bernard G. Waring, also a Quaker, whose wife had died earlier, leaving him four children.  The two families united into a power-house of energy and Quaker values that formed the foundation for Mary's early development.

Now the second youngest in a family of seven children, Mary grew up in a big house on Penn Street in Germantown, PA within a large community of Quaker aunts, uncles, and cousins.  Most of these relatives were members of Germantown Friends Meeting, and many attended Germantown Friends School, as did Mary, graduating in 1936.  Mary's early life was filled with social activities revolving around her big family and Quaker Meeting.  Her mother Gracie (as she was universally referred to) was very devout, and brought her children to Quaker Meetings and worship groups several times a week.  From an early age, Mary showed a unique sense of imagination that inspired and entertained her playmates. In his book Quaker Meeting: a Risky Business, Mary's cousin, the well-known Quaker educator Eric Johnson, tells this story:

When Mary and I were about eight years old, we were climbing in a rather fragile, many-branched tree.  At one point, I got a little frightened and said to my cousin, "Mary, we'd better be careful.  We might fall down."
Mary replied, "Well, maybe, but we might fall up."

Young adulthood

By the time she reached college age, Mary had already become very interested in art, though she was still unsure what she would do with this interest.  She began her college education at Milwaukee-Downer College, but the summer after her freshman year events unfolded that profoundly realigned her life.  Along with some cousins and acquaintances from the Quaker community, she participated in a Quaker work camp in Tennessee, helping efforts by the Tennessee Valley Authority to rebuild areas badly hit by the Depression.  By chance, it happened that David McClelland, the son of a Methodist minister from Jacksonville, Illinois, was also at the camp.  Mary and David fell deeply in love, and David soon came to appreciate the spiritual depth and breadth of Mary's Quakerism.  David became a Friend by convincement, and Mary transferred to Radcliffe College to study art and be closer to David while he attended Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.  During their courtship, David was welcomed with open arms into the loving Quaker community of Mary's extended family, and the two were married at the ages of 21 and 20 on June 25, 1938. 

David and Mary McClelland's marriage was a loving and spiritual partnership that grew steadily deeper and stronger throughout their 42 years together.  At the time of their marriage, David was just starting what was to become a stellar academic career in psychology.  Mary was just beginning to find within herself the artistic and spiritual talents that were to emerge in her unique painting style.  Together, Mary and David began a life that was to grow in unexpected and wonderful ways, touching the lives of many, many people along the way.

Family Life

For the first few years of their marriage David and Mary lived in Columbia, Missouri, where David received his master's degree, and New Haven, Connecticut, where he did his doctorate work.  With fresh PhD in hand, David took up teaching jobs at Connecticut College, and then his alma mater, Wesleyan University.  Settling into the rhythms of academic life, Mary and David began their family with the birth of their first daughter Katie in 1943.  Shortly thereafter, in 1945, identical twin boys, Duncan and Nicholas, were born. With their springer spaniel, Willie, the McClelland family soon became a fixture on the Wesleyan campus, occupying faculty housing in the center of campus on Foss Hill.  Many students of that era have fond memories of Mary, Katie, the twins, and Willie gamboling about the campus in various combinations. Mary certainly had her hands full with these small children, but she took to motherhood naturally, and the family flourished.  After two miscarriages (which may well have influenced her perceptions of death), her second daughter Sarah was born in 1953, followed shortly by her youngest son Jabez, in 1954.

In approximately 1950, the McClelland family started to explore the possibility of a summer home in northwestern Connecticut, where David's father Clarence had purchased some land in a community called Yelping Hill, in West Cornwall.  Mary and David soon fell in love with the place, and began spending summers there as David worked on constructing a home-built cabin.  Mary felt very much at home in the woods, and found that she had a deep-seated empathy for all the living things she encountered there.  Much of her inspiration for painting animals came from the closeness she found with nature in this rustic setting.

Art and Teaching

By the 1950s, Mary's artistic impulses had started to come into focus, and she began to experiment in earnest with painting.  In 1956, the family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where David accepted a position in the department of Social Relations at Harvard.  Moving into a huge Victorian house at 81 Washington Avenue, the family had space to spread out, and Mary set up a painting studio in the basement.  Soon she was painting seriously, in between caring for her children, and became associated with the Cambridge Art Association, where she had several shows. 

As Mary's interest in art intensified, and as her children grew, she found that she was also developing a strong interest in art education.  This interest blossomed when she and David joined a group of Quakers from Cambridge Friends Meeting who were interested in starting a Quaker school.  In 1961 they founded the Cambridge Friends School, selecting Mary's brother Tom Waring as the first headmaster.  Mary became the art teacher, and soon she found unfolding within herself a unique approach to teaching art, based on seeing, that deeply touched the lives of many of her students.  A glimpse of her approach can be found in this pamphlet she wrote about some of her teaching experiences.

Travel

Along with David's rising fame as a psychologist came opportunities for travel, which Mary and David took up with enthusiasm.  Beginning with a summer seminar in Salzburg, they visited Europe several times, including a 10 month stay in Florence in 1959 with their children Katie, Sarah, and Jabez.  1960 brought a summer in Tepotzlan, Mexico, near Cuernavaca, where David and Mary rented a hacienda with Duncan, Nick, Sarah and Jabez.  This was Mary's first encounter with a third world culture, and it proved to be a turning point for her art.  Something about the Mexican attitude toward death - a certain matter-of-fact acceptance and at the same time a fascination - resonated with Mary, and she began to see more clearly the paintings she was going to create. 

In 1963 David took a sabbatical, and he and Mary went with the two younger children to Tunisia for nine months while he did research for the Ford Foundation.  On the way to Tunisia, they took a world tour, stopping in Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, India, and Kenya before heading to North Africa.  On another sabbatical in 1968, Mary and David chose Ethiopia as their destination, with another circuit around the globe on the way.  This time they stopped in Fiji, Australia, Thailand, India, and East Africa before settling in Addis Ababa for five months.  In all these places, Mary spent most of her time exploring the countryside, filling sketch books with hundreds of interesting people and animals that she saw.

With the growth of their children, Mary and David soon took seriously to traveling, making countless journeys to nearly every corner of the globe.  Stimulated mainly by David's interest in applying his psychological theories on achievement motivation to developing third world economies, but also by Mary's love for taking in the sights, sounds and smells of foreign cultures, they spent time in the Caribbean, Peru, South Africa, East Africa, West Africa, Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka.  In Africa, Mary particularly loved the game parks, with their graceful animals and fierce predators.  She found something there that spoke to what it was she was trying to bring out in her paintings - something about the relationship between God, life, and death:

"The plains are spotted with carcasses - ribs - skulls - bones and skins and legs - no dilly dallying about death - it comes swiftly and uncompromisingly, and there are no reprieves.  It's clean, clear - like the air here - but it's not man's way.  I've been taking photos of carcasses as well as animals.  The secret is somewhere here - I want to find it."

Of all the countries Mary visited, she seemed to develop the deepest relationship with India and Sri Lanka.  During another sabbatical in 1971, David and Mary lived for six months in Sri Lanka, where Mary became entranced by elephants.  They lived in a guest house that had working elephants, and Mary had ample opportunity to get close to them.  When she returned to the US she generated a series of pen and ink drawings of elephants that are considered by some to be her best work - marvelously depicting the playfulness, power, and mystery of these creatures.

Both in Sri Lanka and India, Mary also learned first hand about the spiritual teachings of Buddhism and Hinduism, which had a profound effect on her life.  Absorbing such things as the Perahera festival, with its lightbulb-draped elephants (which Mary filmed extensively), and the multitude of temples and holy places from South India to the Himalayas, Mary deepened her spirituality, and found new directions for her art.

Community and Spiritual Growth

One of the most prominent features of Mary's life was her sense of community and the connections she felt with so many people.  Starting in the early 1960s, Mary and David began letting foreign exchange students live in spare bedrooms in the huge house at 81 Washington Avenue in return for chores.  Mary really loved taking these students in and learning about their cultures, and she and David liked the feeling of a busy, active household that the extra people brought.  As the 1960s progressed into the 1970s, the practice of taking in foreign students extended to friends of Mary and David's children, David's psychology students at Harvard, and eventually just people with whom Mary and David felt connected. 

About that time, one of David's most remarkable students, Richard Alpert, returned from India as Baba Ram Dass, having spent a number of years on an ashram devoted to the guru Neem Karoli Baba.  Through the connection with Ram Dass, Mary and David's house soon became a landing place for people returning from India at various stages of their spiritual journeys.  Taking these people into her home seemed very natural to Mary, and what resulted was a spiritual community at 81 Washington Avenue that developed and grew in many directions.  Mary and David never gave up their Quaker roots, attending Cambridge Friends Meeting regularly, but saw the rich traditions of India as a way to deepen and broaden the spiritual paths they were following through Quaker worship.  They also explored other spiritual paths, and spent time with a number of holy men ranging from the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche to a local healer named Karmu.  One of Mary's favorite teachers was Hugo Maier, a homeopathic doctor from Germany who had spent many years in India with the guru Sri Ramana Maharshi.  Hugo had become a spiritual teacher himself, and Mary and David spent many summers in Switzerland, and winters in Tiruvannamalai, India, participating in spiritual workshops with him.

Death

In 1978, stomach problems that had been bothering Mary for some time were diagnosed as gastric cancer.  While the news had a profound effect on Mary's family and all the people she was connected with, Mary herself seemed to take it with a certain equanimity.  After all, she, more that anyone else, had been coming to terms with death for many years through her paintings of dead animals and bones.  Perhaps she saw her impending mortality not so much as something to be feared but as a natural step and an opportunity for spiritual growth.

After surgery, Mary recovered her health for a period of time and spent much of her energy connecting with the people she loved.  Towards the end of 1979, though, her health deteriorated again, and she slowly and gently prepared for death.  Eschewing nearly all interactions with hospitals and doctors - her cancer was at this point not treatable by standard medical practices anyway - Mary stayed at home and gradually became thinner and thinner, all the while comforting and calming the many people around her. 

By the Fall of 1980 Mary had become extremely weak and was suffering no small amount of pain and discomfort.  Nevertheless, she maintained a positive outlook, and was able to go through all of her paintings with her friends Ruth Stokes and Russ Windman, cataloging and commenting on them (most of the quotes in this website come from a transcript of those conversations).  As November moved into December, David reported several times that he awoke in the morning to hear Mary murmuring "It's so beautiful..." in the moments before she was fully awake and aware of her uncomfortable body.  On December 12, 1980, Mary finally stopped returning from that place where it was so beautiful, and died peacefully in her sleep.