BRUNSWICK — When Marji Greenhut first moved into her studio at Fort Andross nearly 30 years ago, the interior of the old mill’s second floor was just wide open space. She picked her view — one that overlooks the river and is eye-catching enough that she tells visitors to “go take a look or it’ll drive you crazy” — and the mill’s management built up the walls around her. 

Developer Coleman Burke purchased Fort Andross, a 300-year-old mill in downtown Brunswick in 1986 with a vision for mixed development that would return the site to the status of economic importance it held hundreds of years ago. Greenhut moved in soon after and quickly became what property manager Tony Gatti called “an anchor or cornerstone to the art studio concept at Fort Andross.”

Over the years, her space has started to take shape, as have the spaces of the nearly 150 tenants who now call the old mill home. Sculptures sit on tables, on window sills and shelves. Original photographs and watercolors line the walls. Her uncle’s couch, once-pink satin and nearly 100 years old, sits in one corner of the 1,542-square-foot, high ceilinged room with its whale oil floors, which Greenhut loves dearly, even if she has to wear shoes so her feet don’t get dirty.

The studio is hers, but lately, she hasn’t been using it as much. On Wednesdays, a model comes for people to sketch, paint, sculpt or render however they choose. Sometimes the space is used for Tai Chi or for groups like the Artists’ Rapid Response Team to organize. But more and more, it’s been empty. 

So, Greenhut, 79, the fort’s longest-running tenant is retiring at the end of the year and turning her studio over to artists Frances Pinney and Cynthia Friend. 

“I’m not passionate anymore,” she said plainly, sitting in her studio. “If I was still passionate to do clay, or do any kind of art, I would not give it up,” she said. But it’s time. 

Art has been the main focus of Greenhut’s life for as long as she can remember. 

“I was always doing it,” she said. “There are kids who draw all the time and kids who climb trees all the time, kids who want to play any instrument. I was always doing art.” 

Her mother was a housewife first but an artist second, and introduced her to oils and clay at a young age. 

“I was supposed to get married and do whatever,” she said. “I didn’t.”

She attended the Rhode Island School of Design, ran a studio in New York City, sold ironing board covers in Macy’s basement (“before Macy’s was fancy,” she said) to make ends meet. She hitchhiked from Athens to Istanbul, crammed onto a bus with chickens and ducks, warming her feet on the tailpipe, rented a car and drove through Morocco and photographed Moroccan potters, taught art classes in Nepal and eventually found her way to Brunswick, where she spends most of the year — save three months when she lives at Findhorn, a spiritual community in Scotland.

Despite the sculptures, paintings, drawings and photographs in her studio, Greenhut considers herself an artist “with a small ‘a.’” An Artist, one with a capital “A,” is someone like Rembrandt, like Henry Moore, someone whose power of expression lives on today. 

But for her, it’s not about being great, it’s about people. 

“There’s always somebody better than you, and somebody who’s worse than you, so we’re all mediocre,” she said. 

She hopes her work can “bring some kind of beauty of consciousness,” to people’s lives. To show them places they might one day like to travel, or to help them realize that their bodies are perfect. 

“I mean that,” she said. ‘The nose and all the fingers. I’ve never seen any body that wasn’t perfect.” 

She is particularly fascinated with the pregnant form, a fact that becomes obvious just by stepping into her studio. 

“I think the woman’s body is a work of art when a woman is pregnant,” she said, calling the pregnant women who have modeled in her studio “gorgeous” with a “radiance” to them. 

It’s not just the woman herself, she added, but also the potential, “the future of what that child will bring to the world,” that fascinates her. 

Her sculptures, primarily but not exclusively done in clay, are often personal. Some of her best work was done after emotional experiences — a battle with cancer, for instance, or a visit to the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps in Germany. The latter shaped a 2011 series of faces sculpted from clay that Greenhut feels she did not create. 

“The faces kind of came to me,” she said. “I really feel that I didn’t make them. They came out of my hands.” 

Her clay sculptures, women, mothers-to-be, faces, abstract pieces and others, are wildly different from her watercolors. These vibrant landscapes, sunrises and sunsets are usually done on planes, she said. 

Her photographs of Morocco and Nepal show a world that is rapidly changing. They “tell of a life that has either ended or is slowly disappearing,” she said, as the traditional dress is put aside for jeans and t-shirts and the temples and monuments have fallen in natural disasters like the deadly 2015 earthquake in Nepal. 

The paintings, sculptures, photos are all for sale as Greenhut prepares to move into the next stage of her life. 

“It took me a long time to say that I’m old. I had to work on it. I woke up one night in the middle of the night and (realized), aging is a gift,” she said. “You get to learn a lot of things, you know, a lot of people who died young didn’t get to learn.” 

Seeing everything out in the middle of her studio as she gets ready to move, with large sales Nov. 23 and Dec. 14, she is in awe. “It’s like a retrospective of my life for the last number of years,” she said. 

As a creative person, she knows she will find another outlet before long, but she’s trying to keep the future open. 

Gatti said he is sad to see his longest-standing tenant go. She has gone from being the first artist and one of just a handful of businesses in the complex to one of 36 artists and 150 tenants. 

“She’ll be dearly missed, she was such an asset to the building,” he said. “She helped promote goodwill, bringing other artists to the mill,” he added “She’s not just an artist, she believes in people and wants to make the world a better place,” he added, and it really “resonated throughout the building.”

This story has been updated to include Greenhut’s visit to the concentration camps. A previous edition of this article misstated where she was. 

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