April 22, 2022

A 94-Year-Old Artist Delights In Sharing His Craft

About Brookdale Senior Living

Shelly Weiser is proof that you can reimagine your life at any age. The now-94-year-old resident of Brookdale Lisle, a renowned artist, didn't begin to learn his craft until he was 75. Now a master carver himself, he enjoys a status of relative celebrity for his skills. He sometimes gets asked, "'Aren't you that wood carver?'" he says, pleased to relay that he recently was recognized outside of a café while having breakfast with his daughter.

The pride and joy that Weiser takes in his work is evident. His Brookdale residence looks less like an apartment and more like a museum showroom. Atop each shelf and surface is perched a delicate masterpiece, wherein stiff wood transforms into fabric, skin and hair. Weiser takes such joy in his art that he never sells a thing he creates; every chunk of wood he has ever hewn to life is there, living alongside him in his apartment. "It gives me a thrill to look at all these carvings," Weiser says of his home gallery, "[and think] I did this? I can't believe that I did this!"

Weiser became interested in carvings in his 20s, but it wasn’t until his 70s that opportunity came knocking on wood. While accompanying his wife, a career artist, to an art exhibition, he came across a table with some of the most intricate and interesting sculptures he had ever seen. When Weiser asked how he could get involved himself, he was told, quite literally, “Join the club!” So, he did. From then on, he spent one evening a week with the North Suburban Carvers in Bensenville, Illinois, honing his newfound hobby-turned-passion. He wasn’t exactly sure where this sudden fascination with wood carving had come from, but once he began studying under a master carver from the Philippines, it all clicked.

When he was 20 and serving in the Marines, Weiser had spent nine months at sea on a voyage to China. While onboard, Weiser befriended two passengers who were priests on their way to a monastery. They all became such good friends that they invited him along, taking him deep into the jungles of rural China in their Jeep.

At the entrance to the monastery stood a large, magnificent wooden gate, the likes of which Weiser had seen only in the fantasy-adventure movie King Kong. The entire township was enclosed within its walls. In their society, sequestered by the jungle away from the rest of the world, explained the priests, all the men were taught wood carving. Once Weiser was inside, he saw that the level of wood carving they meant was not the whittling he was used to.

There, he saw an old man in his 70s — “and I thought he was old because I was only 20,” Weiser laughed — in a room that was both the man’s art and his life’s work. “He was carving the wall. This whole, big wall. It [had taken him] his whole life.”

Weiser’s eyes glistened with nostalgia as he watched the wooden wall erect itself plank by plank in his mind’s eye. “His whole life was carving this room with little figures, with horses and people … and I was amazed at this,” Weiser went on. “And there was furniture in the room. There was this big, huge table that sat 30 people, and on all the chairs were [these] carved, little, tiny figures, all over the place,” he explained, his admiration and awe still palpable.

Fifty years later, Weiser himself had become “an old man in his 70s,” surrounded by his art and his life’s work, absolutely enamored of the craft he had seen all those years before. Now, after a career as a shoe salesman, Weiser says that the only thing he enjoys more than carving is sharing his art with others. Every week at Brookdale Lisle, he offers an exhibition in the atrium of his sculptures, each of which takes three months to make. He also offers weekly classes, teaching 12 other residents to carve wood as he does.

For Weiser, starting life at Brookdale hasn’t been the beginning of a new life and the end of his former, but a natural progression of the life he had come to love before. “It keeps me going!” he says of his craft. “I’m busy all the time, and I still belong to the carving clubs I go to every week.”

For Weiser and for his students, carving isn't just a creative outlet — it's a means of staying sane. To his fellow seniors, Weiser offers one piece of advice: “Get interested in anything,” he states simply. “It keeps you busy, and you have to keep busy — or you go nuts.”

“You’re still living,” Weiser continues, “and [staying active] changes your living standards and your whole way of thinking. And I think it extends life too.”