Artistry in Rice family spans at least three generations

Clay Rice will bring his furious fingers to Beaufort this week.

Gripping small scissors like the ones his famous grandfather used, Rice can snip out a keepsake silhouette portrait in mere minutes.

Sittings are lined up throughout the day Thursday, when Rice comes to the Bay Street Trading Co. in downtown Beaufort to cut portraits and sign copies of his new children's book from the Joggling Board Press, "The Lonely Shadow."

Time was, no Lowcountry home was complete without framed silhouette portraits of the children done by Carew Rice, Clay's grandfather. The Rices for generations have clung to the Lowcountry like wisteria vines, transferring its sturdy beauty into fragrant art, words and song.

Carew Rice's Lowcountry scenes have been appreciated everywhere from the street-side of the Walterboro drive-in movie screen, to the streets of Paris, where this beloved Lowcountry character picked up his trademark beret that matched his pencil mustache.

Carew Rice's black ducks, herons, egrets, cattails, palmettos, moss -- his singing ladies selling shrimp in baskets on their heads -- stand today, 38 years after his death, as dark, silent friends, like owls in the night. His swampy, silhouetted Lowcountry scenes are still available on the glasses and tumblers that many also saw as must-haves.

And they live through the fingers and imagination of his grandson, Clay, who literally learned at Carew Rice's feet.

Clay, now 50, also does silhouettes of the Lowcountry, with a backlog of orders at least a year deep. He lives in Charleston but thrives on the scenery on the Chehaw River in rural Colleton County. His great-grandfather -- columnist, conservationist and historian James Henry Rice Jr. -- bought the old plantation in beautiful Wiggins, near Walterboro. Clay says, "It has not changed in all these years." Maybe that's why his other vocation as a songwriter and singer has produced an album called "Frogmore Standard Time."

Or why the S.C. State Museum in Columbia featured an exhibit in 2005: "Southern Shadows: 75 Years of Rice Family Silhouettes."

The little scissors Carew Rice bought on a whim for a quarter live in the furious fingers of Clay. His work here this week will be among 35,000 portrait silhouettes he'll do from coast to coast this year.

Carew quickly moved into scenes inspired by Dubose Heyward's novel, "Porgy." And the unspoiled plantation, where his eloquent father knew every twig and feather. And where his grandson still slows down to capture the beauty of life on Frogmore Standard Time.