After two days of failed forecasts, to say that I regard today’s reports of impending snow with skepticism is an understatement. It is mostly cloudy, true, but as with yesterday’s dawn, the sun is already finding a way through the veil. Still, the temperature at sunrise is a good ten degrees colder than in recent days, and so it’s just possible that we may see flakes before the day is out.
What we are seeing is a a view that unfolds here daily, never the same twice: the interplay of the light.
Much is made of the famed and so-called “Taos Light,” although what is really meant by that is the “Taos Pueblo Light.” In this place, it is its own character, its own being, very much its own spirit — a fully-actualized inhabitant of this land, with a life of its own. It is also more than that, of course — it is, in our way of things, a spirit being of sorts — an example of raw elemental power filtered through various media so that we may perceive it, use it, benefit from and be blessed by it without being burned or blinded.
The light is given to us by spirits who dwell in the heavens, the sun and moon and stars, and by their earth-bound cousin, fire. Too much of their power is fatal for us, mere mortals that we are, but mediated through the veils of atmosphere and sky, treated with respect and their usage carefully controlled, the light of the heavens and of fire alike are crucial to keeping us and our world alive.
In this place, the light is inextricably intertwined with life in all its facets and forms.
Including art.
Artists, particularly painters, depend upon the light to do their work. It informs what they create in the most elemental of ways, as necessary to it as canvases and brushes and the paints themselves. Here, however, its reach in the world of indigenous art extends far beyond painting to touch unlikely art forms: as subject and substance; as model and medium.
Today, we’re going to explore the phenomenon of the light in this place, simultaneously a living thing and being of the spirit world, through the lens of its role and place in the art of the people indigenous to this land.
A note: Today’s post will be image-heavy, illustrated in large part through Wings’s own photography.
It begins here at dawn.
In this place, the sun is fully a part of our day from the moment the first edges of its glow crest the peaks. Even on those days when clouds mask its more obvious rays, it makes itself known, if only by its relative absence. We are, after all, at 7.500 feet above sea level even here at the mountains’ feet. At this altitude, dawn is a chilly proposition even during the hottest days of summer.
On the best mornings, however, we are blessed with a mix of clouds and clarity, particularly in autumn and winter. One these days, Father Sun himself becomes an artist, painting the southeastern skies in the sort of intensely brilliant scape that no oils can match.
For those who live in flatter, less rural environs, such sunrises are far more rare. When I lived in one of the world’s largest cities, there was very generally little color in even the brightest dawn sky beyond a blinding yellow-white. It was not, to my eyes, especially attractive: cold and metallic, it left my eyes burned and spirit abraded. But here, in the oldest “city” on the continent (because at more than a millennium of existence, the Pueblo’s ancient village is this land mass’s oldest continuously inhabited community), the dawn light paints not only the sky, but the village walls.
Even in winter.
Perhaps, in actuality, especially in winter: The position and angle of the sun at that time of year are such that the sunrise falls directly against the village’s upper walls, turning them a soft and gentle rose gold against the green and white of the peaks, blanketed in piñon and dusted with snow.
Of course, the light’s effects on the ancient walls does not diminish with the change of seasons; it only assumes new frm and shape.
At the right time of year, the sun bleaches the old clay facades nearly white, the color of old bone:
It throws the cracks and patchwork into sharp relief, weathering the old wooden doors and transforming the latillas of the nearby arbors into the desiccated antlers of some giant prehistoric creature.
Step back a few paces, and the picture changes yet again:
The walls turn cubist, all sharp points and geometric angles, dimensions and depth on full display courtesy of light and shadow.
And then there is the panoramic village view, one in which the light at end of day transforms Taos Pueblo into a true City of Gold:
Light, of course, depends upon the dark for its existence, at least in perceptible terms: Without the darkened space of shadow, light is nothing more than unrelieved glare, blinding to those of us with mere mortals’ eyes. But working in concert with its opposite, light becomes an artist itself: It creates the linear landscapes of the triptych of images that lead off this post, and it paints its subjects with form and shape and pattern that change from one moment to the next.
And so, the world becomes a series of interstices; the old arbors become shelters made of arrows’ feathered shafts, held aloft by dancing wooden katsinam in shadowy case masks:
It turns a simple pine ladder propped against a newly mudded wall into a recreation of the people’s emergence, the embodiment of the path up and out of the dark void to bask in the blue light of the turquoise sky:
And it sets the City of Gold at new angles, creating lines and thresholds and spaces between as the angle of the light creates sharp right angles joining pole to planet and plaza to peaks:
Of course, the same clay that turned Taos Pueblo, in the acquisitive eye of Spanish invaders, into that mythical lost City of Gold is the same clay (with one small variation) that its clay artists use in pottery and figurative works.
The earth here is red: a warm tawny color that whirls in the dust of the plaza and rests in damp deposits along the mountain watersheds. The clay used for a thousand years and more to build and maintain the homes of the Pueblo’s ancient village is of this same color, but it is a subdued form, lacking (for the most part) the specific mineral content that is found in a deposit on tribal lands restricted to the members of Taos and Picuris Pueblos.
The seed pot above, one that can be found (and purchased) in our Other Artists: Pottery gallery here on the site, is made of clay from the latter deposit. In the photo, it does not look especially shimmery; that’s by design. The artist chose to texturize its surface, perhaps for purposes of making it easier to hold securely, since it is a functional seed pot. The rougher texture and the lack of polish via the firing process give it a flatter finish, more like the adobe bricks used in building the Pueblo’s walls and homes. If you bring it into the sunlight, however, you’ll see the shimmer in the clay.
It’s a product of mica.
In the bowl below, one wrought in an ancient Four Sacred Directions pattern by master potter Angie Yazzie, is finished in such a way as to bring the mica to the forefront of the piece:
Even when photographed entirely in the shade, its smooth surface gleams. In this rendering, the mica becomes, glitter, glimmer, and glow, the fire and flame of the sun itself, a million points of refracted light in a bowl designed to serve the spirits.
Of course, sometimes Father Sun feels the need to show himself in a more express form, and Wings has been there to capture his presence.
This is actually a tin-work sculpture that rests between two sections of latilla fencing here on the land. He installed it years ago, and to this day, we have at least one incarnation of the sun to catch and filter the light no matter the time of day or season.
Speaking of more obvious artistic manifestations of the sun, there is one version that has long been popular in the Native art of the Southwest, particularly of the Pueblo peoples. It’s known generally as a Sun Spirit (we use the more accurate rendering “Spirit,” rather than “god,” although non-Native sources consistently refer to it as a “Sun God”). It’s generally depicted as a round orb, sometimes golden yellow, often white, with a feathered headdress of “rays” and a visage partially bisected in black lines, with short horizontal black lines serving as eyes and mouth. Sometimes, it’s more stylized, with a bit of artistic license taken with the more standard features.
It is not unusual to find such representations of the Sun Spirit, and therefore of the light, on iconic forms of traditional art. Katsinam are one obvious example. Traditional carvers have long summoned such spirits from the wood, garbed in traditional dress decorated in the symbols of the sky spirits: the thunderheads and the rain, and of course the sun itself. The Hopi-style Longhair above is a case in point, with the lower-right quadrant of a traditional Sun Spirit visible near the bottom of his robe. It’s a classic image, one that finds expression frequently in Southwestern-style Native jewelry, too, particularly in the inlay work of Zuni artisans.
The use of sunlight imagery in katsina artwork leads, rather naturally, to a discussion of rain. After all, the role of many of the katsinam, particularly those like the Longhair shown above, is expressly bound up with the blessing of the rains. And in this high desert land, the rains are the province of late-summer season known locally as the monsoon season.
In some parts of New Mexico, the rains traditionally have begun early in the summer months, although climate change is altering those patterns, too. Here, they are generally a late summer phenomenon, one that typically begins in late July or early August and extends into September. And as with all else, those patterns are changing here, too.
Nevertheless, Wings has captured the light that often accompanies monsoonal storms on numerous occasions, and it is one of the most spectacular weather phenomena of this land.
The photo above was taken, with his old film camera, a decade or so ago, in a year when monsoonal storms extended well into autumn and the changing of the colors. Even while all remains green here, the aspen lines that flow down the peaks begin turning in September, rendering whole mountainsides bright gold.
On this particular day, light and shadow and storm all combined to turn the valley between two of the peaks the very color of molten fire, bright yellow gold touched with an aurora of orange and red, fading thence into the blues and purples and black of the thunderheads and the earth itself. it turned a valley of the shadow quite literally into a valley of the sun.
But monsoon season provides more spectacular lightshows than mere aspen fireworks. On some days, we aregiven the gift of the full arc of the light:
It’s the entire spectrum, in one of the most brilliant representations I’ve ever seen. This image has not been retouched in any way; those were the actual colors of the rainbow in the sky that day, and they were nearly neon in intensity. It’s a function of the enormity (in both senses of that word) of the cloud mass that accompanies such storms, of their deep dark color and the brilliance of the light. It even sets the leaves of the young aspens aflame, all electric green fire dancing in the light.
As our clients know, Wings works primarily in two media: photography and silver. The former is an obvious choice to capture the light . . . but he frequently does so with the latter, too. Or, to be more specific, with the precious stones he uses in his silversmithing.
Let’s begin with a stone that embodies the imagery of the photo above: the capturing of a rainbow of light.
We’ve covered labradorite here before, as a part of our Jewels and Gems series. It’s a stone of simultaneously subtle and showy beauty, one that depends, quite literally, upon the light for its full character to be seen, its full expression to be realized. It is a somewhat cloudy, smoky gem, one whose primary color is gray — but it possesses a translucence that is unusual among gemstones for its ability to refract the light along a spectrum of color, a quality known as labradorescence. It also manifests in an even more intensely colorful form known as spectrolite, but true spectrolite comes from only one known region on earth, in Finland.
As an aside, Wings was recently given several truly spectacular cabochons of labradorite, He’s working with them now; be prepared to see some breathtaking new pieces in the days and weeks to come.
There are, of course, other gemstones that possess translucent qualities. One of the most obvious and notable (and common) is quartz, which comes in a seemingly infinite array of colors and patterns (although in reality, the hues and matrix patterns are indeed delimited, although widely variable within their respective categories). Some of the most spectacular, for purposes of showing off their the stone’s ability to transmit light, is smoky quartz:
This is a faceted gem, rather than a cabochon, and for this particular piece of smoky quartz, it’s the perfect type of cut, far more effective at displaying its ethereal qualities than a plain domed gem would be. In this image, you can see how the color of the stone itself varies stretching from a dark brown the color of coffee at one end through several gradations that become perfectly clear at the other. You can also see how the faceting of the gem’s cut further catches, holds, and refracts the light, creating long bars that shimmer like holograms within the stone, changing appearance, and even existence, depending upon the angle and wavelength of the light used.
Smoky quartz appears in another form, too, one that is marked by inclusions known as rutile:
In this business, this form of quartz is popularly known as rutilated quartz, but it’s not really a discrete category of quartz; rather, it’s a variant of quartz that manifests in most, of not all, of its colors. The needle-like rutile is actually noun rather than adjective, but it’s become common to treat it as the latter. The specimen above is actually and exceptionally small teardrop-shaped cabochon, one with almost no doming to it at all. Several discrete colors of quartz are bound up in it, ebbing and flowing together and apart a bit in the manner of oil and water. There are lined inclusions that separate the colors, white, peach, gold, brown, black, clear . . . but throughout the entire stone, rutile explodes like fireworks, or like the ice crystals that form a snowflake. It’s a phenomenal display of light held fast in a very tiny package.
Wings has used rutilated quartz before, as well, in a different color. One of his collections in miniature that most embodied the light of this place — indeed, the two pieces that constituted the set shared the very name Taos Light — were the necklace and bracelet shown below. They were designed to coordinate and complement each other, but were made available separately. The bracelet sold about eight years ago; the necklace found a home much more recently, with a friend on the other end of the country for whom added light in the winter is both a physical and spiritual need.
As noted above, the stone that comes in multiple colors and shades; the teardrop-shaped one shown above embodies several different hues in one cabochon. This pair is made of yellow quartz, although in truth, they were more honey-colored, with the tiniest hint of peach throughout the stones. They looked like nothing so much as the light of the sun itself, captured and held fast within the stone, as though hardened in amber.
Wings decided to make that aspect the focus of each piece.
As you can see above, on the reverse side of the pendant, Wings created an ajouré bezel. If you look closely at the center of the stone in the cuff immediately below, you’ll see that he did the same with this setting, too.
The cut-out shape on each is nominally that of a diamond, four-pointed, with the longer points at top and bottom. But that’s not all it is.
As you can see, the sides between the points are not straight lines; rather, they are gently curved, giving each the effect of a highly-stylized Morning Star. In this way, he fused the sun’s light of day, embodied in the stone itself, with the lesser lights of the darker skies, and allowed the glow and feel of the stone again to filter through to the wearer’s skin.
Occasionally, the imagery of light in a given gemstone will be more subtle, but no less real.
One gemstone that embodies the glimmer and shimmer of the sun — indeed, so much so that it resembles the local micaceous clay in its effect — is aventurine. It’s a stone that comes in a spectrum of hues, including blues, greens, yellows, and even an orange shade. But a few years ago, Wings acquired this cabochon of white aventurine, a shade much less common — and one that shows off the stone’s inherent shine to spectacular effect. In this instance, he used it as the focal point of the hawk pendant pictured here. Like the “diamond-cut” rope chain from which it hands, it catches and refracts the light beautifully. But what doesn’t show in the photo is one additional artistic touch: Wings used a jeweler’s saw to excise the back of the bezel in a shape that tracked the outlines of the stone. In this way, the stone (and the light it captures and holds) may touch the wearer’s skin.
Sometimes, Wings creates a piece that embodies the light, both connotatively and denotatively.
Such was the case with this work: a simple finger cuff made of polished brass, stamped here and there with subtle traditional symbols. It is indeed the color of the sun’s dawn rays, but more than that, the name chose for it — quite simply, Sunlight. It’s an incredibly simple, elegantly spare means of carrying a little of the sun all day long. The piece, along with an anticlastic counterpart named for the dawn itself, remains available for purchase in our Rings Gallery.
Sometimes, the imagery of the light is both express and implied simultaneously. An example is this concha belt, a work we featured here only last Thursday:
At first glance, the connection to notions of light probably seems attenuated, at best, to most viewers. After all, all of the stones used in it are turquoise, and turquoise in exceptionally bright blues and greens, at that. Perhaps it’s the silver, with its shimmer and shine?
No, that’s not it, either.
If you read our post here last Thursday, you’ll already know the answer: It’s the stampwork on each concha, including the buckle — each of which forms and ancient and wholly traditional sun symbol. Most of the outside world knows it as the Zia symbol, from the Pueblo of the same name, situated west of here; in one particular form, it is their nation’s logo and official symbol (and one that has been stolen wholesale by the state for its flag, as well as by countless commercial profiteers worldwide). With subtle variations, however, it’s a symbol that has been known to the peoples of this broader region since the time before time, and forms a part of their respective cosmologies and cultural imagery.
Speaking of sun symbols, it’s a motif that frequently find expression in Wings’s work in a number of other ways, as well. Some are complex and multilayered, combining color, form, shape, and symbol to create a motif that pays tribute to that spirit that crosses the sky daily. Such is the case with two pairs of earrings he created in recent months.
The first, which sold almost immediately to a dear friend as a gift for his wife, were entitled Dawn of a Red Sun. As their description, found in the Earrings Gallery here on the site, put it:
In our world, Father Sun is red. Wings captures his image in its purest form, two perfect garnet spheres of deepest scarlet placed at the center of a silvery sky. The earrings themselves are perfect circles of solid silver, lightly domed, repoussé-fashion, into traditional conchas. On the convex side, each garnet opens into concentric orbits of hand-stamped rays, each created by melding and linking traditional symbols in a revolving cycle: a starburst ringed by whirling spirals of stardust, each ray ending in a flared spoke of the sunrise itself.
You can read the full description and see the reverse side here.
They were not, however, the only such pair he would make last year. He followed up shortly thereafter with another pair that reconceived Father Sun in terms of his gaze, choosing a stone with a color and name to match. These were called Sun’s Eye, and their symbolism was described, in their entry in the same gallery, as follows:
Father Sun’s gaze is chatoyant warmth and golden fire, captured in a pair of earrings that embody this powerful spirit’s own eyes. Two solid, substantial sterling silver conchas lightly domed, repoussé-fashion. Each is stamped with concentric rings of traditional symbols: the sun’s coronal flare spiraling clockwise, extending into sunrise symbols. Beyond the small signs of the dawn symbols of life itself open and flower, each secure in the embrace of a ring of larger sunrises edging each concha. At the center sit the spirit’s eyes themselves: round tiger’s eye cabochons of near-feline aspect: the same warm rich golden brown of our people, gaze touched with a pearlescent fire that forms the light and warms the earth.
You can see the full entry here.
Once in a while, however, it all comes together in a particularly powerful way. We featured this piece here in a #ThrowbackThursday post a few weeks ago; it’s a necklace he created some half-dozen or so years ago.
In this instance, the imagery of the sun’s light came together in multiple and complex ways: the stone itself, in the color of the dawn’s fiery orb; the symbolism of the eagle feather, which our peoples often use at morning (and other) prayers; and the name of the piece. He called it Greets the Sun, a reference to the feather’s role in those morning prayers, and he anchored it with perhaps the most spectacular amber cabochon I have ever seen — brilliant orange, shot through with a matrix of incredible color and depth, hints of scarlet amid glimmers of gold, collectively producing an effect that really did look like flames captured within an orb.
Of course, Father Sun is artist not only at dawn; he draws and paints, sketches and sculpts throughout the course of the day, an avocation to accompany the vocation that is his daily journey to provide warmth and light. At no time is his talent more obvious than in winter, when his gaze turns ordinary structures into shadowy silhouettes thrown into sharp relief upon a white and snowy earth:
Traditional latilla fences are notable for their service as interstitial barriers. They combine the best of doors and windows with the shelter and safety of a more solid wall, keeping out predators and threats while permitting the light to filter through the gaps. The sun turns the poles into works of weathered art, lit from back and side until they resemble the oldest of standing spirits, gathered protectively around. But the light also gives them a second life, a second self, in their shadows upon the snow: a series of lines and spaces between that exist in another dimension and series of dimensions, connected, related, and yet still apart.
In winter, of course, the light becomes as starkly beautiful in black and white as it ever is in color:
It becomes impossible to tell where the world ends, where lies the seam where earth meets sky, and the light turns the rocks and trees into living spirits, witnesses to its own art . . . and to time and history alike.
But perhaps the most beautiful light in winter is in that magical time just before twilight: that given to us in the setting of the sun:
The trees become dancing spirits in its softened glare, arms outstretched to embrace the fading glow.
The fences and ladders are transformed from something utilitarian into something wholly magical: the embrasure of an invisible kiva, one by which the spirits visit our world.
And as sunset turns to twilight, the winter sun turns once again to fire:
Falling snow turns silver in the warm coral light.
Once that threshold is passed, the colors change yet again, and the peaks opposite Father Sun begin again to glow, just as they do in monsoon season: now a paler gold, one underlit with white and touched with rose, against blue and purple skies carrying night’s arrival.
But it’s not only winter, although that is an unusually magical time for the art of the light.
The warmer months, too, see vibrant palettes of fiery colors dashed across the darkening heavens:
It becomes, in this place, a reminder of emergence, that in a few short hours, we will, with the rest of our world, rise once again into the light.
It becomes, at times, a world on fire, a view that bespeaks strength, of standing tall and proud, tempered by the flames and found able to transcend them.
Sometimes, it’s the heavenly art of peace and serenity, of the sure and certain knowledge that the sky spirits still move, still dance, still share their gift of light with us:
And at day’s end, as Father Sun retires to his rest, his glow gives way to brighter, more sharply focused lights: the shooting stars that travel across the sky above the echo of his still-warm but sleeping self.
It is a darker palette, to be sure, but one that allows us to appreciate the light all the more.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2016; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
