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 from auction artist Lola Brooks...

  

 

Penland School of Crafts, June 1996 

"I have just shown up at Penland for the first time ever and I am wary of the expansive verdant landscape that surrounds me. And all of those friendly people everywhere...

I have just driven my yellow 1973 super beetle down from New York City, and barely made it up the hill in spite of the fact that I adjusted the carburetor once I hit the mountains. And my clutch began slipping just south of Fancy Gap. I am happy to be off the road in one piece.  

 

I am here as Jamie Bennett's assistant in his enameling class in the upper metals studio, which is focusing on Limoges or painted enamels. He is my professor at SUNY, New Paltz where I am working on my BFA in metals. My lodgings are in Homosote.   

 

At the end of my two weeks I will be doing a changeover with the incoming metals studio assistants for the next session: Suzanne Pugh and Stacey Lane. They will both go on to become long-term pillars in the infrastructure of the school.  

 

In spite of the fact that I have been warned about a black snake who has made its home in the wall of the metals studio, on my first trip out to make a phone call in Toll House, skipping along the path, I laugh to myself that some joker thought it would be a good prank to lay a rubber snake across my path as if it were sunning itself, soaking up the warmth of those flagstones. I leap nimbly over it, shrieking mid-flight as it slithers away, disappearing in the direction of the metals studio. It takes me a full minute to catch my breath. Clearly Dorothy is not in Kansas anymore... 

 

It will take me a few days to find my feet within the tranquil beauty of my surroundings and the social and creative cacophony of a summer session at Penland. I will spend the session eating, sleeping, breathing, and making craft from dawn 'til dusk 'til dawn. Before I even understand what has happened, I will have been completely seduced by Penland's magic. I will daydream that perhaps one day I might myself get to teach a class at Penland.

 

I will search for ways to hurl myself back into Penland's orbit, hoping to return again and again. Penland has this effect on people." 

Lola Brooks' work in the 2012 Benefit Auction: Limoges Demi-Parure, sterling silver, fine silver, vitreous enamel on copper, 7-1/2 x 1 x 1/4 in.

 

New York City, June 2012 

"Sixteen years later, I want to tell you how Penland has fed me on every level. I have had the good fortune to sit down to that feast as an artist, maker, teacher, student, friend, and contributing member of this vibrant community. 

 

I have had the opportunity to teach two summer workshops, and a spring concentration that was one of the most remarkable groups of students I have ever taught. I have luxuriated in being a student thrice more. In fact, the spark that ignited the body of work that would evolve into my first solo exhibition in 2002 at Sienna Gallery occurred in a summer session in upper metals.

Penland's gravitational pull has not yet loosed its grip on my heart. Far from it, in fact. The snake, on the other hand, has long since found other accommodations, I am told." 

Vintage 

"Every year I try to give back some of what Penland has offered me in hopes that the table will never be bare for those who seek to partake of this elaborate banquet, that no one need go hungry in the face of such a rich and varietal cornucopia of artistic opportunity. 

 

I made the two pieces I am donating to this summer's benefit auction during that first class I assisted in 1996. The animal prints are vitreous enamel on copper, painted using the Limoges technique that Jamie Bennett taught us, set in hand-fabricated sterling and fine silver. The bracelet is one-of-a-kind. 

 

To this day, I am still obsessed with animal prints." 

                                                                          
                                                                            - Lola Brooks  


Want more? Click here to read a story about Lola's favorite Penland class. 

  

Lola Brooks is an artist, metalsmith, clotheshorse and sometime writer living and working in New York City. She began her education studying fashion at Pratt Institute and then received her BFA in metalsmithing from SUNY New Paltz. Her work is represented by Sienna Gallery in Lenox, MA and has been reviewed and/or included in many publications including five of the Lark Books jewelry series; AmericanCraft, Metalsmith, W, Vogue and BlackBook magazines. This fall Lola will be joining the University of Georgia in Athens as the Lamar Dodd Chair.  She has been an adjunct professor at RISD since 2007, and holds the rank of Master Lecturer at University of the Arts in Philadelphia where she taught from 2001-09. Other teaching includes SUNY New Paltz, Penland, Haystack, and the 92nd Street Y in New York City. Her work is in the collections of the Samuel Dorsky Museum, New Paltz, NY, the Racine Museum of Art, Racine, Wisconsin, the Museum of Art and Design and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

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