Daunis Fine Jewelry

After nearly thirty years working together, Patricia Daunis-Dunning and her husband, William Dunning, display the kind of comfortable familiarity and creative synergy that make for a great team. Seated in the front office of their three-story walk-up studio and showroom in the heart of Portland, Maine, they tell their shared story.

Born in Maine--she inland, in Auburn, he near the coast, in Brunswick--they both attended the Rhode Island School of Design. While they overlapped a year (Bill was a senior when Patty was in her first year, in 1969), they did not meet until several years later when a match-making friend introduced them. They married on a saltwater farm in Maine during 1974.

Daunis-Dunning intended to study architecture when she got to RISD, but ended up trying several different artforms. In textile design, she learned she could render "really well," but tying tiny threads did not suit her sensibility. She eventually discovered the metal shop, which master metalsmith Jack Prip directed (he had come to RISD in 1963 as an instructor and ended up launching the undergraduate and graduate programs in metal). Prip and three graduate students took Daunis-Dunning under their wing. She also studied with the pioneering Dutch-born jewelry designer Emmy van Leersum, a "taskmaster" who helped hone her vision.

Bill Dunning had an equally stimulating course of studies at the noted design school. Two teachers in particular stood out: sculptor John Bozarth and painter George Pappas. Dunning credits the former with teaching him how to make objects "turn the corner," to make them truly three dimensional. Pappas taught the Albers color course, which helped his student develop an eye for arranging gemstones in remarkable combinations.

Dunning recalls extensive work in classical disciplines, including drawing and modeling, "but once you got through that," he notes, "you had the freedom." His wife shares that memory of students pulling all-nighters to finish projects. The metalwork excited her, but she tried to get around doing jewelry projects. "I was never going to do jewelry," she remembers vowing to herself; "I loved hollowware."

At one point, Daunis-Dunning told her mentor Prip that she wanted to learn many techniques, to which he replied, "You can learn them later." While teaching in the Program in Artisanry with metalsmith Fred Woell at Boston University from 1976 to 1981, she heard the same desire expressed by her students. "Memorizing all the words in the dictionary," she remembers telling them, "won't make you a great writer." They had to have a story, she advised, and then they would figure out how to tell it.

After graduating from RISD, Daunis-Dunning set a goal of teaching metal at a college level without a master's degree based on her ability as an artist. She had heard about the program at BU and liked the philosophy: teach craft in such a way that students can make a living from it when they graduate. With a recommendation from Fran Merritt, director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (where she had served as a monitor for several workshops), she was hired. While she loved teaching at BU, Daunis-Dunning noticed how professors with tenure tended to subsequently stop pushing themselves as artists. She took a year off (1979-1980) to work on designs and then went back for a final stint, saving everything she earned to open her own business.

The first home for Daunis Fine Jewelry was the State Theatre Building at the center of what is now known as the Arts District. The building has housed many jewelers over the years, providing studio space for the likes of Stephani Briggs, Devta Doolan and Stephanie Sersich. The business stayed there for four years (1981-1985) and then moved across the street to its current quarters.

Meanwhile, her husband had been in the wine business, but he had become disillusioned with the direction it was headed. When the jewelry business moved to the larger space, he came on as manager and partner. Today, the couple lives in Brunswick, about forty-five minutes north of Portland. They like having the studio separate from their home. They opened a showroom in the space five years ago; prior to that, they only sold their work through galleries. The decision to add a showroom came out of the realization that while people in North Carolina, Wisconsin and further afield knew about their work, in their home state they were barely visible.

Since opening, Daunis-Dunning reports, they have widened their following in Maine and New England and have had some exciting projects come through the door. The showroom and workshop have become a destination as the buzz has spread. "We're not swishy," says Dunning; "It's not your usual jewelry store." The showroom offers a retrospective selection of the couple's work from over the years, from a piece of blacksmith work by Dunning that hangs over a door to a group of exceptional married metal works, which used to be their production pieces.

"We don't want to be predictable," explains Dunning when asked about the approach that he and his wife take to designing jewelry. As they develop new work, they push themselves to avoid the trap of the status quo. "This creating is supposed to be hard to do," Dunning says. Daunis-Dunning echoes that sentiment: "As an artist you need to push yourself."

Daunis-Dunning comes up with the basic design idea, working from an assortment of projects she keeps on hand: bits and pieces of forms she has created in copper and brass that serve as an incubator--prompts--for finished pieces. Sometimes she will set a timer and see how many shapes she can come up with--she enjoys the pressure to create. "A lot of pieces start with a form," she notes, "and then I push it."

After establishing the design, the couple will work out the manufacturing of the item and how many pieces should be in the collection. While his wife focuses on the metalwork, Dunning provides the color. "We start off with a form that stands alone and looks great by itself," she explains, "and then Bill embellishes it to make it more interesting," adding that "if it's not good to start with, putting stones on it will not improve it."

They consistently seek to push the envelope. One suite of pieces features toothpicks, which have been cast in gold and silver and then arranged in dynamic configurations. A toothpick brooch resembles a bolt of lightning. "It's all in your mind, what's precious," says Daunis-Dunning. Asked about some of his favorite stones, her husband immediately mentions spinels. They come in all colors, he explains, but red is the most desirable. He has an emotional response to stones and an intuitive sense of how they will work together.

One collection bears the curious name "Atuik," which turns out to be an acronym for "All tied up in knots." Daunis-Dunning traces the inspiration for these woven pieces to the New Works program at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, a special biennial session offered to former faculty. She wanted to create something that bridged sculptural and woven/textural forms. Her studio mate suggested she visit a resident basketmaker, which led to the design.

The night before meeting with this writer, the pair could be found at the Space Gallery, one of the most happening arts venues in Portland. Dunning was there to cheer on his wife as she took part in a Pecha Kucha, those fast action PowerPoint-fueled presentations begun in Japan in 2003 (the word can loosely be translated as "chit-chat," but there is nothing casual about them).

For her twenty-slide, six-plus-minute talk, Daunis-Dunning recounted the exhilarating and somewhat terrifying tale of a special commission completed the year before, an eighteen-karat gold egg to honor a retiring CEO of a Chicago bank. In addition to the egg, the couple suggested a clutch of small sculptural elements representing moments in the man's life. Made of sterling silver and held in a black silk purse, these objects included a cast of the Knife Edge, the narrow ridge at the top of Mount Katahdin, Maine's highest mountain.

Daunis Fine Jewelry has received a number of prizes over the years. The egg won first place for "custom design distinction" at the twenty-second annual MJSA Vision Award Design Competition earlier this year. It was an "all hands on deck" project for the studio, with members of the Daunis workshop contributing at every stage of the project. The couple has drawn their workshop team from the Maine College of Art, Southern Maine Community College and other programs (their first employee, Sharon Portelance, teaches at MECA). The current group includes Aaron Decker, Holly Gooch, Daniel Marcucio, Gillian Bryant, and Lindsey Simpson. In some cases their stint at the benches has lasted a long time (Gooch is in her eighth year).

"People love the workshop," says Dunning, noting that it gives someone who does not understand how a piece of jewelry is made a chance to see the workings of an artist. At the same time, the bench team members enjoy sharing the process and the challenges. "It's good for their work to talk about it with visitors," he says. "The bench is a place to figure out if you're going to succeed as a jeweler."

Commissions have helped Daunis Fine Jewelry weather some rough patches, especially the 2008 downturn in the markets. They work with clients, who often come bearing gemstones that they wish to have set in new designs. The couple thrives on creative problem-solving, whether working on a commission or a new suite of ornaments.

They consider jewelry to be site-specific sculpture. "If I was a sculptor and I was commissioned to create something for a lobby," says Daunis-Dunning, "I would visit the building, walk around the space, study the dimensions, lighting." The same thing goes for a ring or a set of earrings: they have to work with the body they will adorn.

The business has gained extra visibility--and traffic--through Portland's First Friday Art Walk, which was launched in 2000, and now encompasses a wide swath of the city. Daunis Fine Jewelry was an early venue participant. Recently, Daunis-Dunning served on the Creative Portland task force focused on the First Friday Art Walk. Daunis Fine Jewelry mounts a new show every two months, providing another incentive to visit the studio. Among the offerings this year were an exhibition of encaustic paintings by Chesye Ventimiglia and "The Opulent Forest," a display of nature-related jewelry by Aaron Decker, a goldsmith at the studio.

Daunis-Dunning participates in a number of trunk shows across the country, often working through galleries--Spectrum Art and Jewelry in Wilmington, North Carolina, Rasmussen Diamonds in Racine, Wisconsin, to name a couple. She and her husband also do juried regional craft shows, including the Paradise City fair in Northampton, Massachusetts, and the Maine Crafts Guild's Directions show in Bar Harbor.

Many of their pieces are inspired by the Maine landscape. For example, the "Water" bracelets and rings relate to the rivulets and the forms they create in the sand at low tide on Popham Beach in Phippsburg. The shapes in these pieces curve and intertwine in an organic manner. Clients have the option to have gemstones or diamonds set in the interstices between the wavy lines of fourteen karat gold or sterling silver.

"I love water, light playing on water," says Daunis-Dunning. "That's the stuff that makes you go, 'Whoa!' " Clients have complimented her on the movement in her forms. "They don't actually move," she notes, "but they move your eye around--they have visual movement."

The business's tagline recognizes the special cachet the twenty-third state enjoys: "Made in Maine, worn around the World." The branding is based on a story provided by a client. Her daughter was in Italy and she climbed Mount Vesuvius. When she reached the top, she encountered a couple and they started talking. The wife asked, "Are you wearing Daunis jewelry?" The client's daughter nearly fainted: she was.