The second half of May: The lilacs began to bloom yesterday . . . and it is snowing here this morning. Not much, to be sure — only the tiniest of flurries, widely spaced, melting nearly as fast as they fall. But it is snow all the same, crystallizing for a brief moment on windshields, dotting Raven’s dark coat with white.
This is not even a record here. I’ve seen snow fall out of the sky here as late as the tenth of June. Still, it’s a reminder that spring is the trickster season, arbitrary, capricious, always looking for trouble and always eager to pass it along to the rest of us.
That’s one side of spring. The other is mostly yet to come, although we caught a brief glimpse of it a couple of days ago, when the mercury hit eighty and the water flowed fast down the ditch to overflow the banks of the pond. Spring’s more pleasant side is one of a blossoming warmth and light.
It’s a side that finds expression on all sides of today’s featured work — and each of those sides is shown here today. From its description in the Rings Gallery here on the site:
A Flowering Light Finger Cuff
In summer, the whole world blooms beneath a flowering light. Wings summons silvered blossoms into being year-round with this finger cuff, a self-adjusting ring that rests gently on the finger even as it reaches upward to touch the light. Anticlastic shaping provides graceful curves at either edge and an underside as smooth as silk. Before shaping, the hand-cut band was milled in a contemporary floral pattern, large slender petals like peacock feathers spread across its surface in a random array, rising gently to provide a textured surface. The band tapers elegantly at either end for a comfortable fit. Cuff is 11/16″ across at the widest point, and 7/16″ across at its narrowest on the ends (dimensions approximate). Side and underside views shown below.
Sterling silver
$375 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Most of the highly stylized floral imagery on this ring, hand-milled into gently textured relief, reminds me of the bold, vaguely British-mod Flower Power designs of the late Sixties. There is one angle that is the exception, however:
It is this side of the ring, pistil and stamens spiraling near the band’s edge, unwinding outward into long, graceful rays. This image, offset from center and manifest as both flower and light, evokes the feel of Art Nouveau work at its best: less Alphonse Mucha than Frances and Margaret MacDonald of the Glasgow School. Indeed, Frances’s famous watercolor entitled “Spring” is an exemplar of the feel and spirit of the period, and this small bit of silver shows a family resemblance (and a seasonal one, too). It’s one of my favorite art movements, haunting, lyrical, one that fits as well with the flowers of spring as with the swirling leaves of autumn, as much with the gentle rains of summer as with the shrouding snows of winter.
And that is a salient aspect of this piece, that is not bound to one season or time. It blossoms, yes, with the rays and petals of the warmer months, but it holds within it the spiral of the stormy seasons, too.
Much, in other words, like this day in this place: on the downward slope toward summer, with winter making a brief but insistent, triumphant return.
The snow will pass, if indeed it has not already. The clouds, too; we can likely expect intermittent sun to turn steady near dusk. Even the winds are calmer today, if still sharp-edged and cold, gaining strength here and slowing again there, uncommitted either to winter or spring. If the long-range forecast holds, we can expect a return of warmer days around the middle of next week, the mercury escalating slowly in its journey toward summer.
For the moment, however, the southern horizon remains hidden entirely behind a wall of new-falling snow, and the eastern peaks are thinly veiled here and there by the same flurries landing outside the window. As spring inhabits its trickster role more fully than is perhaps strictly necessary, we dream of a blossoming warmth and light.
~ Aji
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