Penland School of Crafts 27th Annual Benefit Auction
August 10-11, 2012
Here's the next in an ongoing series of Penland Benefit Auction newsletters, featuring artists whose work will be a part of this year's auction. We have invited trustees, staff members, collectors and friends to write about pieces that will be included in the summer 2012 benefit event and to comment on living with the works they have purchased in past auctions.
A few words about auction artist Caroline Vaughan...
Caroline Vaughan is a fine art photographer who studied her craft with luminaries John Menapace and Minor White, and has been a student and teacher at Penland many times. Her work is in the collections of institutions like the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Polaroid Collection, the Gregg Museum of Art and Design, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and the Mint Museum of Art, and has been published in Camera (Switzerland), Zoom (France), and Aperture magazines, Quartet: Four North Carolina Photographers (Safe Harbor Press), and Borrowed Time: Photographs by Caroline Vaughan (Duke University Press). Caroline's ongoing attempt to interpret the natural world and its human inhabitants has taken her on a journey of extremes - traversing North America, logging more than 75,000 miles, to capture the vastness of nature, while also working quietly, closer to home, photographing her own family over a span of decades.
We asked Penland trustee and Caroline Vaughan's longtime friend William Singer to share his thoughts on her contribution to this year's benefit auction, Hunter #1, an archival pigment print (15-1/2 x 12-3/8 in.) from a negative she created at Penland in 1970:
A quick glance and there she lies-splendor in the grass. Wait... is that right? Perhaps he lies? Or sits? Or kneels? Or burrows? A body seems to dive into an oncoming flow of wheat. What is going on? The title, Hunter 1, suggests multiples; is there another Hunter, lurking outside of the framed view, or under the mantle of grass? Do I see a Francis Bacon torso tossed aside in a nondescript field, the detritus of Hunter 1's bounty-a headhunter's delight? Could this be the day of creation? Adam drawn from the earth (from North Carolina clay?) or Gaia emerging? Or returning? Is this part of a missing visual narrative in a gloss on Bernini's Apollo and Daphne (the most exquisite sculpture in the Western canon)?
Dear Reader, you see Caroline Vaughan's imagination at work, and what power it demonstrates. When not capturing the most lucid images possible of the living in portraits of breathtaking clarity, she explores the human figure in the landscape-preferably an unclothed and female figure, thank you very much. Note her two lifelong passions-rendering with her own platinum standard of absolute honesty the brutal realness of each individual, and fabricating tableaux of heroic human artifice set in nature (not just "any old" natural settings; rather ones of subtle or dramatic beauty).
Forget the body for a moment. But how can you? Its flank is dead center in the image. Try anyway. There before you, capturing afternoon sunlight, is a sliver of nature, a corner of pasture with its amazing texture of grass, its composition balancing light and dark, shifting values, groomed and wild, open and closed, horizontal and vertical, and its implied journey from outdoor "room" to "room." What is happening in the area surrounding the next patch of sunlight?
And the human form, ambiguous in its configuration, contrasts brilliantly with the grass's lighting and texture, with the shade and shadow of nature. What are we to make of this composition-an act of brazenly simple, utterly unanticipated artifice-the pleasure of mystery and the mystery of pleasure? Tell me, when have you ever seen a river of grass flow toward a naked human torso in a country pasture? Who combed that grass, anyway? Better yet, who thought of combing that grass? Was it Yahweh, at the creation of humankind? If so, to what end? Was Caroline Vaughan present? And now she's decided to let us in on the secret-she's really the universe's first human (and photographic artist to boot!) and Adam a mere second? Or perhaps Caroline is a celestial being, and had original copyright on the human story for the heavenly host? Maybe she and Yahweh agreed to keep the joke between them, and they're just now letting on?
No, it's simply Caroline being white-hot Caroline, traipsing over hills and dales with her colleagues, saying: "Stop. Clothes off. Here, in the grass. Sit or kneel, and hold it!" I know; I carried her cradled in my arms, both of us naked per her instruction, as I walked through a large patch of poison ivy on her family farm in southern Virginia thirty-eight years ago, for a double portrait. Imagination flambeau. - William Singer
For more information about Caroline Hickman Vaughan and more images of her work, you can click here to visit her website.
________________________________________________________ Join us... Auction Weekend Tickets $375 Includes all Friday and Saturday activities Friday, August 10
Friday-only tickets $200 Cocktail party, exhibition preview and silent auction, dinner, live auction, dessert party, live music, and dancing Saturday, August 11 Saturday only tickets $250 Coffee at the studios with Penland's resident artists, silent auction, lunch, live auction, and a reception at the Penland Gallery The Penland School of Crafts Annual Benefit Auction is a gala weekend in the North Carolina mountains featuring the sale of more than 200 works in books, clay, drawing, glass, iron, letterpress, metals, painting, photography, printmaking, textiles, and wood. The Penland auction is one of the most important craft collecting events in the Southeast and a perfect opportunity to support Penland's educational programs, which have helped thousands of people live creative lives.
An illustrated auction catalog and online preview will be available in July.
Absentee bids are accepted with a $25 bidder fee. All proceeds benefit Penland School of Crafts. Penland School is located 52 miles northeast of Asheville, NC.
_______________________________________________________ Quick Links Penland Website Penland Blog Classes Support for Penland Art for Penland Facebook YouTube Flickr Penland School of Crafts is a national center for craft education dedicated to helping people live creative lives. Located in North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains, Penland offers workshops, artist residencies, a gallery, and community collaboration programs. Penland School is a nonprofit, tax-exempt institution that receives support for its programs from the North Carolina Arts Council, an agency funded by the State of North Carolina and the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art.
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