Artist can rest on (or eat off of) her creations

Harriett Belag does not believe in retirement.

Luckily, the 83-year-old’s commute is not as bad as most Riverdalians’, which is good considering she’s had three hip replacements. She walks about 40 feet from her bedroom, through her living room art gallery, across a polyurethaned canvas she painted of butterflies and sunflowers that serves as the floor to her foyer, and into her homemade art studio.

In the tiny studio, Ms. Belag teaches painters and sculptors of all ages how to become artists. It’s also where she works on her next masterpiece.

Ms. Belag is a throwback.

She creates usable, or functional art, which is inspired by the dawn of civilization when “almost nothing was purely decorative.” Almost every sculpture in her living room is a piece of furniture. She sculpts chairs, benches, mirrors, coffee tables, end tables and candle holders. The massive sculptures may have taken her months to complete and look as though they should be forever behind velvet ropes at a museum, but she wants people to use them.

“Sure, sit down,” she told a Press photographer during an interview at her Whitehall apartment last week.

The photographer timidly sat down on the piece, named “The Conversation,” which features two life-size figures at opposite ends of a wooden bench.

“I don’t work very small,” Ms. Belag said, though she herself is spunky and diminutive, with strong assertive hands.

“I have arthritis all over except my hands,” she said, making fists with her hands to show how strong they are.

In the art world, she is best known for her chairs. She creates whimsical, almost fairy tale-like, characters out of clay, which serve as the backs of the chairs.

Her style is inspired by her upbringing. She was the only child of working class parents on Macombs Road in the Bronx and spent a lot of time by herself, using her fertile imagination to entertain herself, honing her drawing skills or reading one of the books she regularly checked out of the library, six at a time.