Born in the year of the Summer of Love
(1967), Jeanine Payer’s early memories similarly involved an
appreciation for alternative realities. One of her great pleasures was
to get lost in elaborate literary fantasies — The Wind in the Willows,
The Chronicles of Narnia, The Little Prince — that took her to places
far removed from her Southern California home. When not immersed in a
book, she could often be found redecorating her dollhouses, fashioning
all manner of Lilliputian food and furnishings — such as tiny mouse mugs
with insides no larger than the head of a pin. "I've always had a
strange knack for making impossibly small things," recalls this daughter
of an actress, who was ably assisted by her mother’s set designer
friends. Which all turned out to be excellent preparation for her future
metier
A few years later, as her literary tastes expanded from Beatrix Potter
to Kundera, Auden, and Dostoyevsky, Jeanine (with dollhouses in tow)
migrated to San Francisco to attend art school. After experimenting with
multiple media (an art school imperative), she found her greatest joy in
making jewelry for the amusement and adornment of herself and her
friends.
Raiding her childhood dollhouses for tiny photographs, she embellished
them with vintage ribbons and millinery fittings and fashioned earrings
and charm bracelets she describes as "very Alice in Wonderland." In a
scene akin to an actress being discovered in a Hollywood coffee shop,
Jeanine was working at the design lab/concept store Aerial, when the
proprietors noticed her earrings (antique buckles with tiny ribbons and
photos woven through them) and promptly declared their desire to sell
them — an occasion she recalls as both "thrilling and terrifying."
Around this time (the merciful end of the go-go eighties) two seminal
events occurred. The Loma Prieta earthquake rocked and roiled the Bay
Area. And, at the urging of her now numerous store accounts, Jeanine
acquired an engraving tool so that she could start signing her work,
which was becoming highly collectible. "It was transformational! I was
homebound in the days after the quake, and that tool became an extension
of my hand," says Jeanine, who had serendipitously discovered the means
for melding powerful words with precious metals.
As her reputation grew, Jeanine's work found its way to places as far
flung as Fred Segal in Los Angeles, Barney's New York, Harvey Nichols in
London, and L'Eclaireur in Paris. "I was still kind of in my own world,
and had no idea how my audience had grown, until I looked up during the
Academy Awards one night to see Jessica Lange accepting an Oscar wearing
a pair of my silver earrings that incorporated baby photos — rather than
some huge dangly diamonds!" Susan Sarandon has requested pieces for her
film characters to wear ("When I'm watching the movie I think I'm the
only one who notices"), and Mick Jagger has commissioned pieces
inscribed with his own verses. |