Jean Wall Penland Illustration
Some people exist in your life on the periphery; important, yes, but for whatever reason they are there yet seldom actually present.
Jean Wall Penland was such a person for me, and I was saddened to hear of her death in early July. She was 81, and my wife and I had last seen her last year when I talked her into illustrating the short story that appeared at the back of the December-January edition.
Jean was a professional artist, poet, teacher, and self-described eccentric who lived in our hometown, Asheville.
For many years Jean was a music copyist in Manhattan, working by hand to write out scores and instrumental parts for orchestral performance, long before computers learned to do this.
“She was one of NYC’s greatest music copyists, correcting errors in orchestral scores as she created the individual parts,” said John Whiting, a friend who lives in London.
I met Jean when I was a kid and my big sister, who worked at The Arts Journal, an influential Asheville magazine, had to drag me along to work in order to get me out of our mother’s hair.
Jean was the art director at The Arts Journal, and in 1983 was co-founder of Atelier 10, the first ‘working artist’ exhibition space in downtown Asheville.
“She was a driving force behind The Arts Journal—a real forward-thinking publication that showed us what Asheville was to become,” said Laura Boosinger, an acclaimed traditional musician and executive director of the Madison County (North Carolina) Arts Council.
Jean was a creative and prolific artist. She received a Pollack-Krasner Foundation grant in 1989, offered through efforts of the late Lee Krasner, one of the country’s leading abstract expressionist painters and the widow of Jackson Pollock.
In 1993, Jean received a Gottlieb Foundation grant, funding set aside by the estate of abstract expressionist Adolph Gottlieb and his wife, Esther, to benefit what he called “mature, creative painters and sculptors.”
Jean’s paintings were exhibited in many shows throughout the Southeast and are held in numerous public and private collections.
I do not mean to wallow in sorrow, but Jean’s passing proved a harbinger, as the next month saw the deaths of two people who were much more than peripheral, and whose impact distinctly shaped how I am writing the words that you are reading.
Joseph Lalley Jr. and Elizabeth Hutton were stalwarts at St. Genevieve-Gibbons Hall, the Asheville school I attended from kindergarten though eight grade. Mr. Lalley was the headmaster, Mrs. Hutton was an English teacher.
She taught me to intimately appreciate the written word. Without her, I wouldn’t have come to be writing this.
In my fourth grade she spent a few minutes every day reading aloud to us, from the book Where the Red Fern Grows. She must have done this before, for she knew exactly when to have boxes of tissue available as we all began to cry, sitting quietly at our desks, listening to her read out loud the fate of Old Dan and Little Ann, two beloved red-boned coonhounds who are central to the story.
If you haven’t read Where the Red Fern Grows, find it and read it. It is a classic.
I am sure many of you have had similar moments, hearing of the death of someone whose efforts were critical in your growth and development.
So here’s to celebrating those who got us to where we are; may our achievements be some sort of positive reward for the time you invested in us.
—Jonathan Austin