The skies this day have hinted at something to come — wide bands of iridescent clouds heralding a change in the weather, and with luck, an actual storm. After retracting any real likelihood of snow this week, the weather service has now reversed itself, more than doubling the earlier predictions to a fifty-eight percent chance on Friday.
It won’t be a lot, but we’ll take what we can get.
In the meantime, it’s a good thing that the major outdoor tasks for the week will be mostly complete by then. There will be still be feeding of animals and mucking of stalls to do, but the horse vet and the farrier will done for this rotation, and I, at least, will be spending any snow day indoors by the fire as much as possible. It’s not that I don’t like the snow — I love it, actually — but my aging bones don’t handle it like they did even a year or two ago.
But even from the fireside, I can appreciate the gift of the snow, and be grateful for it — grateful, too, for the beauty of the skies that deliver it. Just yesterday evening, we were granted sight of a solitary sun dog just before the last of the sunset glow vanished below the horizon. Iridescent clouds have surrounded the late-afternoon sun daily over the last few days, both a herald and a manifestation of the deep cold of midwinter. At this season, snow is cold-weather medicine: the storm that falls from the light.
It’s an ethereal phenomenon given tangible form in today’s all-new featured work. It’s a necklace, pendant and bead strand both, but that seems a wholly inadequate label for a work whose own description begins by acknowledging its form as the Eye of Spirit on the Thunderbird’s wings. From that description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
The Storm That Falls From the Light Necklace
It’s the Eye of Spirit on the Thunderbird’s wings, the storm that falls from the light. With this pendant cascading from a strand of jewels in violet blues and translucent white, Wings summons all the power of storm and clouds and veiled sun into a single spirit-infused tribute to the medicine of water and light. The pendant comprises three extraordinary matched cabochons of ultra-high-grade Afghanistan lapis lazuli, the larger center cab cut in an elongated kite shape, the side cabs extended versions of what geometry terms degenerate triangles, collectively body and wings with the head just visible above. All are set into scalloped bezels and edged with twisted silver, the better to set off the stormy, electric blue-violet stone marbled with dove-gray calcite matrix and shot through with shimmering pyrite, like the electrical flash of a thousand bolts of lightning. The three lapis jewels fall and flare like rain from a single light source: a highly domed Labradorite cabochon, channeling the sun in the storm and refracting the same deep blues.All are set into a single backing, itself a diamond-like shape that evokes the Eye of Spirit, scalloped freehand on all four edges and stamped in a repeating pattern of a radiant sunrise, each arcing over a tiny hoop. The pendant hangs from a simple, elegantly flared bail, stamped along either edge with the image of the thunderhead, the two rows coalescing at the top. Strung through the bail is a strand of equally ultra-high-grade beads in matching blues and grays. At the center sit large and medium-sized dumortierite rounds bisected by three-bead groupings of single Labradorite orbs with plenty of blue flash, each flanked by faceted moonstone rondels. Moving upward, with the rondels as spacers, the dumortierite morphs into a gradient of Labradorite, rainbow moonstone, and lapis lazuli spheres, accented by single sterling silver rounds and a final segment of dumortierite anchors. Pendant including bail hangs 4″ long; without bail, 3-1/4″ long by 3″ across at the widest point; bail is 3/4″ long by 3/4″ across at the widest point; center cabochon is 2-1/2″ long by 1-1/4″ across at the widest point; side cabochons are 1-7/8″ long by 3/4″ across at the widest point; round cabochon is 3/8″ across; bead strand is 23″ long excluding findings (all dimensions approximate). Close-up view of pendant above; full view of pendant and beads shown at the link.
Pendant: Sterling silver; ultra-high-grade Afghanistan lapis lazuli; Labradorite
Bead Strand: Dumortierite; moonstone; Labradorite; rainbow moonstone; lapis lazuli; sterling silver
$2,000 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Wings has been working on this piece since the beginning of the year, beginning with his unusual conceptualization of it in the first place. The three lapis lazuli cabochons, acquired from a master lapidarist as a three-stone parcel close on a year ago, were very clearly intended by the stonecutter to become a necklace and a pair of matching earrings. The cutwork was extraordinary, and so was the material itself: deep, rich violet-blue lapis, with shades of cobalt and indigo beneath the surface, marbled with dove gray and the silver shimmer of pyrite throughout, each outsized for the grade of the stone, unusually long and domed more than one would expect from such veins. The edges were straight, the corners dagger-sharp, and the material was sold to us as having come from Afghanistan, where the highest grade of lapis is found. Judging by the quality of it, I think the provenance os a given.
But the stones sat on Wings’s workbench — in the open, combined in the predictable pendant-and-earrings pattern, but unmoving save for being set aside when he needed the space for something else. They caught his eye again toward the end of the year . . . and by the beginning of the new calendar year, he had begun working with them.
But to my surprise, he had reconceived them as of a single piece: a triptych of blues, so to speak, all to become part of the same pendant, and all to fall directly from the Labradorite source of the light.
As he worked with it, I could see it in my mind’s eye . . . and yet, I couldn’t, not really. Not like this. It hadn’t hit home that the result would be, inevitably, the diamond-shaped Eye of Spirit, nor that the inverted kit and triangular daggers together would resemble the body and wings of a Water Bird . . . or given their stormy shades and the lightning scattered through them, of a Thunderbird. Placing the light-refracting “head” at the top made the connection inescapable.
And still, I remained unprepared for the result. Yesterday, Wings finally cut the backed bezels free from the silver surrounding them. And where initially he had planned on four straight planes, he had instead freehanded the scalloped edge you see here, all done in one go with a jeweler’s saw and a filament-thin blade, always moving forward, never back, and following the unmarked lines of the stamped arcs he had only just placed all the way around the setting. Combined with the thunderhead imagery on the bail, and the stormy, light-refracting beads that cascade like a mix of rain and snow above?
It is most certainly the storm that falls from the light.
And here, now? That is power. It is spirit. But most of all, it is cold-weather medicine.
And that? Is what keeps our world alive.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2022; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
