Leupp's Loop: Research isn't always what we expect

"Jewelry is a way of ... identifying people's choices," says Leslie Leupp. The brooches are made from plastic, copper, gold leaf, and brass.

EIfin, eager Leslie Leupp arrived at this magazine's office one day bearing slides of a work of art he had created with University Research Initiation Grant funds. He wanted "people at Penn State to know what its money was used for," wondered if ResearchlPenn State had room.

I accepted the slides as graciously as I could and passed them among the other two women in the office. As soon as the artist seemed safely out of earshot, we three (three writers, two working mothers, one heavyweight power lifter, all thirty something) erupted in peals of embarrassed laughter: The slides showed four tiny replicas of the Venus de Milo - that famous, chesty, broken armed Roman goddess - one each colored black, silver, zebra, and white. The Vermses were lined up on a block of metal with a large silver plate on their heads; a classical pillar held up the plate's other end. It was a cake stand, the artist had explained; its title, 'The Trouble With Beauty Is. .

Was this art? we laughed, uncomfortably, not knowing if we were laughing at the artist or u4th him. Surely Leupp was joking. He had such a mischievous smile. Share his work? What a card.

A month later, still curious, I went to the artist's office.

Although a jewelry maker, Leupp was wearing no jewelry but a plastic watch. He had dressed for the 90-degree-weather in an ordinary plaid shirt and khaki shorts. Bald, bespectacled, with a day's growth of beard, he had a painful-looking swelling on the side of his jaw, the result of recent gum surgery. He spoke engagingly, enthusiastically, enigmatically. He sipped iced Coke from a jelly jar. Spread out on a black card between us were samples of his most recent bracelets and brooches, stunning works in simple shapes and colors, gold and patterened metal and stone, each the sort of ornament one would be willing to build an entire wardrobe around, the sort of ornament that says something about the wearer

Attracted by the bracelets, I slipped one onto my arm, a process a writer in Metalsmith magazine, talking about Leupp’s art, called "a problem of subtle adjustments." The bracelet was a square of thin, blackened steel wire with a granite and copper design on the face, bars like guitar strings marching inward from the other. It took two hands to secure onto the arm: Leupp drew a rubber-grommetted interior wire up tight against the underside of my wrist, against my pulse. The wire structure protruded inches from my arm. I thought briefly how impractical it would be to wear while writing. "It looks like my arm is being guillotined," I joked, suddenly eager to have it off, despite its beauty.

"It's interesting you say that," Leupp smiled. "I like to get that tension into my work. It's asking something of you as the wearer, asking you to get involved. Suddenly you're aware of your body in a new way.

Soon up for tenure review at Penn State, Leupp has been through it three times before, at Ball State University, Indiana University, and Texas Tech. Twice he received tenure; each time, he left a secure position and faced tenure review again in order to 'Jumpstart" himself as both artist and teacher, to renew his "integrity and discipline," to keep himself "vital" and "informed."

He is a "born, raised, and baptized" Mennonite, one of eight children from a strict, traditional family who worked their Ohio farm sunup to sundown, day4n, day-out, growing, harvesting, and putting up food for the winter. Mennonites are Plain Folk: No jewelry is worn. "But I had an aunt who was more liberal," Leupp told Metalsmith "She loved costume jewelry. Once a year, she would clean out her drawers and bring a paper bag of jewelry to the four youngest children in our family. We'd divide this hoard up and each of us would have a little stash. I'd bury it like pirate's gold."

Like costume jewelry, much of his work has a trompe l’oeil quality: The stone-and-gold brooches laid out before me, when lifted, proved featherlight; what I had thought was marble or granite turned out to be only Corian countertop, sliced thin.

"I'm very intrigued with fake things. That's not exactly right: I'm intrigued with illusion, with the fact that it's not the cost of the materials, it's not the manufacturer's label that gives something its value.

"I fooled you, but I wasn't trying to. Corian is just as good. It doesn't have to be stone to have integrity, validity." He is, of course, right: The brooches remain no less striking, no less exciting for their "artificial" substance. As he wrote in his proposal for the faculty research grant: "The familiar has been manipulated to create a sense of mystery which commands a curiosity on the part of the viewer."

Leupp did not remain a Mennonite. While in college, he said, "I kind of remember getting a letter saying, 'We no longer recognize you as a church member."' He fingered an earlobe punched with two or more holes. People who know his work - his modem, sophisticatedjewelry -are always "shocked," he said, when they see his home: It is furnished in Early American antiques, simple, handmade stencilled pieces, most of them a century old. "I wouldn't give up having had that background as a Mennonite," he told me. "It's my salvation. It means everything to me now. It has nothing to do with a religion, it has to do with a philosophy.

"Two ideas describe what I do - or why I do it. Quality. I'm trying in a very small way to do something to the best of my ability. And who I am. I don't think my mother will understand this, but I feel a great responsibility for my individuality. A lot of American life is about being like the person next to you, about belonging. But part of my religion said to me that every day has to be better. Life is going up a hill: growing, evolving, getting better. I believe each of us has this incredible responsibility for who we are, for the evolving of the human in each of us. It's a responsibility I can't shirk.

'The jewelry I make is not about accessorizing. What I do is really about traditional concerns. jewelry is a way of labeling, of identifying people's choices."

He held up the slide of his research-grant work; the cake stand itself was en route to the invitationonly Fortunoff Silver Competition in New York. "I remember when someone first mentioned to me the humor in my work. I said, 'Humor? I'm very serious about my work.'

"There's a sense of play. It's a cake stand, but the stand itself looks almost like a wedding cake, with the figures, the pillars between layers.

'Venus has to do with our idea of beauty - it's usually on the surface. That's where the title comes in. Last night I watched an archeology program on TV and they showed the Venus de Milo, slowly turning it, under lights - ahhhh. It's the Hollywood-Hallmark Card syndrome: How many times can we be seduced into thinking that this is what beauty is? So I put the Venus de Milo, this very serious thing, into an arrangement that seems to imply all kinds of fun. The way they're standing here, there's a chorus-line quality, you almost expect to see them kick ...

"They're salt-and-pepper shakers from the1940s, actually. The salt came out of Venus's nipples." He smiles appreciatively at my guffaw.

"I started collecting salt-and-pepper shakers when I was in Texas because there was nothing else to collect. And when you find these particular salt-and-pepper shakers, you- almost always find them in their original containers, in boxes that say, 'Souvenir of Niagara Falls' or of the Grand Canyon, and that have mailing labels on them so you can send them to your friends back home.

Now if you find a Shirley Temple doll in its original box, it's very valuable. You almost never find the box. But these? They were never used. They were put away unopened. People were too embarrassed to put them on the table.

'That's the trouble with beauty, the incredible trouble it can get you in."