New London — This may be the best illustration yet of art imitating life: when a Columbia-educated clinical psychologist and accomplished sculptor found her muse in Athena Stands Watch, the recently erected, life-sized bronze sculpture symbolically welcoming visitors to this city and protecting its residents.

Renee Rhodes, in her medical practice, imparts wisdom, both clinical and spiritual, to her clients.

Athena embodied wisdom and rational thought through poetry, her espousal of artistic imagination.

Two goddesses of wisdom finding each other at the corner of Pearl Street and Eugene O’Neill Drive, perhaps?

“I feel very connected to Athena, but from the point of view of not being the wisdom, but to help people coming to their own wisdom,” Rhodes was saying recently, during an hourlong voyage of blunt conversation, spiritual awakening and effortless insight.

“My art is very emotional and very spiritual,” said Rhodes, whose therapy practice has been on Channing Street in the city for 20 years. “It tries to connect with each person. It’s a process where I get out of the way. You ask to be inspired, whether it’s God or the muses or whatever. What would really affect and help a lot of people?"

“I went through about 30 sculptures to try to come up with an idea. Iteration after iteration," she said. "I knew what I wanted it to feel like but I didn’t know what it looked like. The (creative) process is this internal sense of guidance to inspire and uplift, to connect and protect. To welcome and to protect for all the people coming in from out of town. Then I found Athena. Or she found me.”

Rhodes’ story, which began in New York City, has made its way to our corner of the world. Her ability to marry art, therapy, wisdom and spirituality — Rhodes’ mystical roads of the tangible and intangible — have enabled clients and patrons alike to find truths that have changed their lives.

“She’s just brilliant,” retired New London attorney and longtime friend Sue Connolly said. “Brilliant. She has this ability to cut to the chase, but in a way that’s new age. She finds the truth — in her art, too — in ways that are amazing. She inspires people and helps people.”

'Art came to me'

Rhodes was once so inspired by artistic forces, she spent six creative months in a cabin on her property with no electricity.

To think, she used to be in the rat race, too.

Rhodes was deep into her 20s working at an ad agency in New York City before her body told her what her mind already knew: get out of this or die.

“Yes, I almost died,” Rhodes said, alluding to a perforated diverticulum, or the bursting of her intestines. “I couldn’t work there anymore, got fired while I was in the hospital, got disability, and finally made the shift to finding something I believe in.”

It took Rhodes 10 years to become a psychologist, conquering a doctoral program at Columbia. She later received a fellowship at Yale, which brought her to Connecticut.

Still, there was more wisdom pulsating through her, begging to find its catalyst. Rhodes' soul knew what her mind couldn’t grasp: that sometimes, inspiration comes from unknown dwellings. Relationships with spirituality and larger forces loom over all our heads like a stock ticker, running currents of shapes and forms at us. Easily seen, but not always understood.

“Art came to me because I didn’t have any other way of saying what I knew. It was a form of truth saying,” Rhodes said. “It’s a very open relationship with larger forces. It’s where you open yourself up to things bigger than you. Universal archetypal currents. You go beyond your own personal truth and stretch to understand something larger and make sense of things. You can do that through art because it’s symbolic.”

Rhodes rode her muse all the way to Lyme Academy, where her artistic life began to inspire her therapy. It was another form of communication, the tangible meeting the intangible. Rhodes found a love, an outlet, a calling.

“I was speaking something. It wasn’t a tree falling in the forest. People were resonating with it,” Rhodes said. “I wasn’t crazy. I was saying something they could relate to.”

Rhodes’ first art exhibit came at the Hygienic, perhaps making New London a fitting home for Athena. And so, when New London had money allocated for an art project — something with a nautical theme — Rhodes’ proposal was accepted.

“I have a history of nautical people in my background. My father and grandfather were Naval architects,” Rhodes said. “Vinnie (Scarano, one of the Hygienic’s founders) brought me the project and said he wanted to weave the history with the nautical. That’s fine, but it needed something else. So I thought of what would be inspiring to people.”

Rhodes said the creative process took about a year and “tearing it up” 30 times before finding Athena, whose wind-swept hair in the sculpture hearkens her role as the guiding light of Odysseus on the boat to Ithaca.

“Renee is brilliant,” Scarano said. “She has this ability to connect. Her work just connects people with art in a way that’s hard to explain. The best way to explain it is to see the way people react to her work.”

“Athena wasn’t entirely my idea. I kind of asked what would make sense here," Rhodes said. "When you request inspiration, it shows up. But you’ve got to be open enough to recognize it. It isn’t happening and then all of a sudden, it’s there because you’ve sensed it inside and you’re looking for it."

"It comes from work and determination of sticking with it," she continued. "It’s not magical in that sense. It’s getting up in the middle of the night and going to the studio. And the next night. The next night. Working on it for three months and tearing it apart. It’s discipline.”

Coming out of your trance

The articles of Rhodes’ faith sit at the confluence of art and therapy, where voyages of self-discovery ride spheres of spirituality.

“The analogy in therapy and art is when you really see somebody, maybe you see through their defenses and you see things they can’t see. It’s not like they aren’t trying to meet you halfway, they have habitual thought patterns they can’t get through,” Rhodes said.

“People feel the same things over and over again. They’re feeling, but the same (lousy) stuff over and over again. It’s because they get up, do the same things, think the same things, go through their routines in a trance," she said. "So, when you want to feel a broader range of things, you have to get out of your trance."

“It’s current theory right now. First you show somebody what they’re doing and the trance they’re in, then you inspire them to imagine how they want their life to be and intentionally imbue that with feeling. You start transmitting that out into the world and things respond to it," Rhodes said. "It works."

“But that trance is hard to wake up from. There are many self-denigrating belief systems. One of the things Athena did for me is that I see people are blown away by it," she said. "They think ‘I can really do this,’ whatever it is that’s going on in their lives. That’s a big deal to me.”

The magic of Athena, Rhodes said, is that she’s not all in your face. She allows you to be.

But, at the same time, the goddess of wisdom sees you.

“The first step in all this is that you are genuinely curious about your own wisdom. You create a sense of acceptance and no limits,” Rhodes said. “You have to get people out of their trance. That’s what the sculpture does. It’s the same process. It has to wake you up. The sculpture doesn’t have as much time to do it. You have one encounter. But it has to somehow make you feel that you’ve been seen. That’s how people open up. They feel like they’ve been seen, you see them and see who they really are.”

Rhodes’ art — and couch — are spiritual safe houses for her clients. There’s nothing she hasn’t seen, from the rat race of the big, bad city to work inside the forensic unit at Bellevue Hospital. Rhodes knows the human struggle.

She also knows its spirit.

“People struggle on so many different levels. Their personality. Their biochemistry. Culturally. They have karma. They have their spiritual pasts. They’re all really important,” Rhodes said. “I don’t see the personality as a closed system. The person is more than the sum of the parts. I work with people’s spirit as much as I work with their personality. The people that show up at my doorstep are open to it. They know how I work. I’ll teach them meditation and do a lot of different kinds of things to help them."

“You could be a master sculptor and be able to sculpt like Rodin. But I’m not sure if everybody can put in the soulful part. If a person stands before my work and weeps, it’s not because I’m a Rodin," she says, "it’s because I touched their heart.”

'I want to sculpt'

Athena will be around downtown for a while now. She’ll protect and inspire. But maybe nobody else more than the woman who sculpted her. Rhodes wants to keep sculpting, reaching out and helping people find their truths.

“Right now, I want to sculpt, but I need commissions to be able to produce the work. It takes a real leap of faith to put everything into my artistic life. But something about Athena made me turn the corner and go ‘I really have to do this,’” Rhodes said.

“If you want things just for yourself, you have a limited number of resources. But if you want things to make a difference and help people, you are provided with more. If it’s in the highest interests of the most people, it will happen. It’s happened for me with the sculpture because it helps people," she said. "I am a helper. I just changed my medium.”

m.dimauro@theday.com