A PRETTY PENNY.

Byline: TOM SHARPE 

Lyndall Bass' artwork soon will be jingling around in our pockets.

That's because the "tails" side of the next version of the penny was designed by the Santa Fe artist.

The new penny will still carry a portrait of Abraham Lincoln on its "heads" side -- but it won't be the Vincent D. Brenner portrait that has been used since 1909.

Instead of the Lincoln Memorial, which has been on the back side since 1959, or one of four scenes from Lincoln's life that appear on pennies minted this year, the 2010 penny will carry Bass' austere shield and scroll.

And because Congress isn't expected to authorize any more changes in the penny for generations, "It's going to be a kick for the rest of my life," Bass said. "Any artist would be absolutely thrilled."

Bass, 57, grew up in North Carolina, attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, earned bachelor's and master's degrees at Indian University, Bloomington, and came to Santa Fe in 1990. Canyon Road Contemporary Art, 403 Canyon Road, carries her landscapes and figurative oil paintings. Her Web site is at www.lyndallbassart.com. She is married to another well-known artist, Geoffrey Laurence.

Two years ago, Bass saw an ad seeking artists for the U.S. Mint's Artistic Infusion Program. She applied, was accepted and joined a pool of artists paid for submitting new designs for coins. The penny was her 12th assignment. Previously, she worked on designs for a commemorative quarter for the Virgin Islands and one of the presidential dollars. The penny is the first time one of her designs has been chosen. She will be paid extra as an honorarium.

"It's very difficult to get one of these things, but I hung in there because I knew eventually I would get one," she said. "We all saw what happened for Glenna Goodacre when she got the Sacagawea coin."

Bass said she began working on the penny in the same way she did the other coins -- making sketches, sending them in and making changes as committees gave her feedback. The heraldic shield, a symbol that goes back to the European crusades, became popular in the United States in the 1780s and was widely used by Union forces in the Civil War.

"The idea is to commemorate Lincoln's preservation of the union," Bass said. "There were probably over 100 different things coming into the mix throughout the whole process, but in the end, they decided they liked the shield because it showed protection."

Bass' shield carries 13 vertical stripes, symbolizing the 13 original states, with "e pluribus unum" (out of many, one) across its top.

She said she came up with the scroll, carrying the words "one cent," to symbolize "a contract, which is what money is. It's a contract of trust.

"I also heard one time that money isn't money unless it's moving, so I decided to do a wave pattern to that 'one cent' so it was rolling along. It wasn't static. It was currency rolling from one person to another."

Bass said she balanced and "humanized" the scroll and shield by using Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, in which a man's limbs form a circle. "I thought that's an easy thing to get human proportions in a circle," she said. "So I put it on there and it actually fit pretty well, so then I just tightened up the curves and the shapes."

The only other feature on the back side of the new penny is "United States of America" around the top half.

Joseph Mena, a staff artist at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia, has sculpted Bass' design so it can be made into a die and sent out to other mints around the United States in time for production to begin in January.

Although Bass' design for the back side of the new penny was unveiled by the director of the U.S. Mint in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, the front of the coin remains a mystery. It reportedly will feature one of the three other Lincoln busts done by Brenner for the

1909 penny and kept in storage for the last century.

"They haven't shown that yet," Bass said. "They're telling people what they're going to do with Lincoln because everyone wanted to know [ETH] but people won't really see it until the coin actually starts hitting the streets. [ETH]

"I'm so glad it's still going to be a Victor Brenner sculpture because it wouldn't even look like a penny without that period portrait on there."

Contact Tom Sharpe at 986-3080 or [e-mail].