Dawn broke this morning across pale golden skies, only the faintest veins of cloud linking the peaks. That is, of course, exactly what we would expect from a September sunrise, but these recent days have had surprises in store.
Yesterday bestowed upon a mix of weather more reflective of the heart of summer here — clear bright morning, stormy afternoon, and a sunset mix of banded clouds and copper fire — but seated within the low-angled light and sharp-edged chill of early fall. It produced stunning skies for the whole of the day, if unexpected results; by now, the rains have usually departed for another year, and the only hope of precipitation lies ahead with October’s first small snow.
October’s other gift, seemingly early arrived this year as well, is its extraordinary skies: bright turquoise by day, banded with gradient green at sunset, nights so clear that the Bridge of Stars (also known as the Milky Way) is clearly visible, and then a dawn wrapped in a blanket of shirred clouds the color of pure flame. Yesterday delivered such skies a few days early, a gift of all the shades of the sun dancing together in the hoop of the day.
This is a land lit by the fire of the autumn sun now, absorbing the light and refracting it back out into our world.
In other words, it’s the perfect time for today’s new masterwork, completed by Wings only days ago, one that embodies the blazing medicine of our nearest star, the one that keeps our world alive. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
All the Shades of the Sun Necklace
One day beneath an alpine desert sky shows us all the shades of the sun, and all of the medicine of its warmth and light. With this necklace, Wings summons the fiery amber glow of the sunrise and the banded sunset flames to dance with the luminous shimmer that filters through the midday storm. The pendant, cut freehand of solid sterling silver, is built around three spectacular cabochons: at top, an elongated trapezoidal specimen of beautifully marbled Indonesian Maligano jasper, sunny shades of gold and peached veined with the slate blue-gray of trailing stormclouds; bookended below, the golden glow of dawn captured in an oval of agatized amber, and all the fires of the dusk in a bloodstone ellipse, beautifully banded in a gradient of dusty rose and ivory, teal and crimson. All three cabochons are set into scalloped bezels atop a single organic backing, framed on their extended edges by freehand stampwork in a raidant motif. The beads in the strand were all hand-selected to pick up the colors in the cabochons, from rounds of slate gray moonstone banded with peach inclusions to sunstone, gray-white moonstone, cloud jasper, and fire agate, punctuated by giant old amber rondels, faceted Indonesian silver barrels, and freeform nuggets of golden and cherry amber, anchored at either end by alternating rounds of fire agate and bloodstone followed by dusky teal Kambaba jasper. Bead strand is 22″ long, excluding findings; pendant including bail is 3-1/2″ long; pendant alone is 3″ long by 1-5/8″ across at the widest point; bail is 1/2″ long by 1/2″ across at the widest point; Maligano jasper cabochon is 1-3/8″ long by 15/16″ across at the widest point; amber cabochon is 15/16″ long by 5/8″ across; bloodstone cabochon is 1-3/16″ long by 9/16″ across (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown below.
Pendant: Sterling silver; Maligano jasper; agatized amber; bloodstone
Strand: Tri-ply foxtail plated with silver; sterling silver findings
Beads: Gray moonstone with peach inclusions; old amber; sunstone; Indonesian silver; moonstone; cloud jasper
fire agate; amber; cherry amber; black moonstone; bloodstone; Kambaba jasper
$2,000 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This is one of those rare works that I had difficulty visualizing as it came together. Oh, I saw the stones arrayed in order on the workbench, and knew of his plans for them. But they are so very different, colors not merely matched but in some ways uncoordinated, and I just couldn’t see it.
And then, completed, it all came together with all the power and beauty of the light it signifies: an instant personal favorite, one to go on my short list of favorites from Wings’s entire body of work, now several decades long.
Because, like yesterday’s unseasonably odd weather, it works — perhaps defiantly, more liekly simply confidently, but it works.
It begins with the extraordinary specimen of Maligano jasper at the top, one of the finest examples of the real thing that I’ve seen. There’s a lot of stone out there labeled with its name and manifest in bands of gold or chartreuse and black that are in fact simply bumblebee jasper. True Maligano jasper is found only (at least so far as is currently known) emergent from the volcanic lands of Indonesia, and it always appears with peachy undertones marbled by blue-gray matrix the color of silvered slate. This one looks much like the midday sky as the storm gathers . . . or like the dawn light of most beautiful days of fall.
Of the two lower stones, the second was imported, as well; it was billed as Dominican blue amber, which I now can neither confirm nor deny. Most of that rare and localized form of amber appears in that substance’s customary golden orange when viewed in natural light. It generally requires special lighting, or placement on an opaque black background, for the blue to show through in any significant way. And it never occurred to me to try to photograph it on black velvet until after Wings had already set the stone. What I do know for certain is that this is not simply amber; it’s agatized, as is clear from the perfect feather-like gradient of bands at its lower end. It’s not white amber, sometimes called royal or royal white; that material is mostly opaque, with a slightly marbled creamy appearance. This is something else entirely. I’ve never seen a specimen like it, anywhere, from any source . . . perhaps because there isn’t another.
The third cabochon has its own mysterious origins, too. It was, if memory serves, labeled “ocean jasper” by the seller. It’s not. Ocean jasper is manifest in an orbicular pattern, meaning that the variations in the differing background shades show up as circles, or orbs. There is, in fact, a variety of jasper with the name orbicular jasper. It’s generally distinguished from ocean jasper by its colors and opacity: Where the latter is mostly forest green, peach, and ivory, with plenty of quartz-like translucence, orbicular jasper manifests in more opaque shades of olive greens bright golds, rusty reds. and occasional lilac with bits of white. Yes, they share a resemblance to this stone, as does so-called fancy jasper, but this is something else: This is bloodstone. You can read about the origins of the name here; suffice to say that it’s most often manifest in a dotted or swirling combination of deep forest greens and rusty blood- or brick-reds.
Most often. But true bloodstone is more complex: Sometimes it’s polka dots, sometimes it’s marbling, sometimes its a stippling gradient that ranges from midnight blue to spruce to teal to ivory to dusty rose to rust to deepest plummy purple. Wings still has a couple of specimens of bloodstone jasper that appear in gradients of such extraordinary color that they’re barely believable. This was a third and smaller of these specimens. And this one? Is a perfect microcosm of the local post-storm sunset sky, green gradient and all.
And the way the pendant is paired with the beads, the entire strand hand-selected specifically to pick up all the colors of the three stones, is inspired: from chatoyant gray moonstone to sunstone and fire agate, to amber and bloodstone and rich green Kambaba jasper, the entire cascade of shimmering gems feels like a hoop of light, holding the sky in place.
Now, at midday, the clouds are returning once more. Part of it is no doubt a little of the fringe effects of Hurricane Ian to the southeast; part of it is probably simply another collection of oddities being visited upon us by catastrophic climate change. Whatever the source, in this place, the rains are always welcome.
So, too, is the cloud-marbled sky and the medicine of the light. This is a land lit by the fire of the autumn sun now, and above our heads and beneath our feet and surrounding us on all sides are the proof of its medicine.
~ Aji
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