Coal Camp Series

Growing up poor in a coal camp would be tough for a little girl. But for artist Lenny Lyons Bruno, being removed from that environment was even tougher.

Written by Carter Seaton / Photography by Ellen Martin

Lenny Lyons Bruno was raised in Cranberry, West Virginia—now virtually absorbed by nearby Beckley—until she was six years old. Then her father moved the family to a small middle class town north of Pittsburgh and her life changed dramatically. They left behind a huge extended family and a lifestyle that was inherent to everyone she knew. Moving meant dealing with strangers rather than people who knew her and her family. While she couldn’t know it at the time, that difficult transition would later become the inspiration for her ambitious collection of paintings called the Coal Camp Series.

Although Bruno and Rick, her husband of forty-six years, now live in Lexington, Virginia, she says the quiet, laid-back town has the same feel as just-across-the-border West Virginia. Perhaps that’s why, after moves to New York, Florida and Georgia, she finally feels at home. And it wasn’t until the day she moved into her historic Lexington residence six and a half years ago that she understood the true meaning of the paintings she had begun during her ten years in Atlanta. “It was like my eyes were opened,” she says. “The paintings are all about growing up in West Virginia. Being in the proximity helped me revisit emotionally and mentally what the work was all about.”

As a self-taught artist, Bruno began her career in the early 1970s, joining her landscape photographer husband on shoots in South Florida where they lived at the time. Their collaboration, which captured the state before it became highly commercialized, was part of a rotating exhibit there. Her work was very abstract and sold well on the art show circuit, but she became restless and wanted to try something new. A trip to a Roanoke, Virginia, museum where she saw Chinese brush paintings on fabric followed by a chance visit to an antique store was the catalyst she needed for a new beginning. Suddenly, she wondered if she could paint on quilts, which were as comfortable to her as a childhood memory. One quilt in particular spoke to her and she refused to leave the shop until she owned it. When she returned home to Atlanta, she bought the supplies she thought she would need and began. In just a few hours, she had a painting. Even now, the process begins with Bruno rummaging through her aunt’s trunks or foraging in antique and junk stores to locate the perfect quilt. Strange as it sounds, she says the quilt always finds her. “It’s like this instinctive knowing that this is the quilt that I need to use for this particular painting,” Bruno says. It’s not the design or the colors that capture her attention, however. She uses the back of the quilt rather than the front so that ultimately only the stitching lines and the texture of the fabric are visible. Each quilt is sewn on a piece of canvas larger than the quilt itself and stretched taut on a frame before it is covered with gesso – a thick painting primer. Then she’s ready to begin applying the acrylic paints she prefers.

Although each painting has its own story, starting with growing up in a coal camp, Bruno is almost unaware of what that story is until after the work is completed. “The whole process with these paintings is that I’m not aware of what I’m doing,” she says. “They are just getting done. I don’t want to sound new-age or anything, but it’s just this weird collaboration that seems to be going on.” For instance, she continues, “the painting ‘Navigation Without Knowledge’ is about starting first grade. There’s a little girl in it. It’s like being torn between family life and how I grew up and now having to navigate a whole other world that wasn’t very friendly—and the teacher was really awful.”

Some paintings also depict her family’s extremely poor living conditions. In “Blackberry Winter,” the large figure in the center of the painting is her mother and the little abstract houses surrounding her are Bruno and her siblings. “The winter of this painting was a very hard time for us,” she recalls. “My dad was laid off from the mines and we were receiving no money from any source. It was a very cold winter and the only heat we had was from a single wood stove. It got to the point where we had hardly any food and no money to buy any, so we ate unsweetened blackberries that us kids picked the prior summer and mom had canned. We always referred to that time as ‘Blackberry Winter.’” When Bruno and her husband owned an art gallery in Lexington, they rotated her paintings periodically. Folks would come in and just stand there for a half hour or so. Bruno says of the exhibit, “It just moves people; they don’t know why, they can’t figure out what’s in it. But it seems to have a powerful emotional pull.”

To date there are ten full-size quilt paintings, four smaller ones done on canvas, and some miscellaneous pieces. Although the entire collection of paintings has been displayed only once, at the Carnegie Museum in Lewisburg, Bruno hopes to get other museums interested in a show of the powerful works. The ten large pieces are featured in an award-winning, full-color catalog produced to present Bruno’s work to museum curators in the hope that they will reach a wider audience. And, although she is still working on pieces in the series, she’s not sure how long that will continue. In her manner of letting the work talk to her, she says, “I’m open for anything. I’m just sort of letting it do what it needs to do.”

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