Dawn broke this morning across skies the color of a new peach: pale orange, backlit with the warming tones of amber, radiant with the silvered glow of a golden sun. The skies seemed clear at first, but it only required a moment’s gaze to realize that the smoke haze is still with us, mountains softly and slightly out of focus, that strange particular shimmer still in the air.
In this place, autumn sets the earth aflame, but this year, we are dealing with the fallout of such phrases taken too literally now.
Still, it’s possible to see, through the faint gray veil, the amber of a darkening aspen line on El Salto’s northerly face. Our own aspens have only begun to go from green to gold in any measurable way, but if the mercury falls as predicted next week, they, too, will be amber and copper and bronze before month’s end. By then, the only glow left will be from the sun itself.
That’s a bit early for us, or it would be in any kind of ordinary year. Of course, these are not ordinary times, and there’s a strong likelihood that we will not see such times again. That’s a reality that will take some longer adjustment, even as we try to adapt to the telescoping of our golden season now.
And so today, I felt the need to focus on a brighter autumn sun, by way of a work that dates back some ten or eleven years. It’s a ring whose style and spirit echo in some of Wings’s newest works, a small informal collection of four jeweled solitaires that consist of simple bands and single orbs atop flaring bezels. All use solid sterling silver molded “wire” for their bands, but this older progenitor was at once both more simple and more complex: Where the newer iterations feature bands formed of a single wide length of pattern wire, the band on today’s featured throwback work is formed of three lengths of sterling silver half-round wire fused seamlessly together.
But there is more to this work than that.
I believe the conceptualization of this work began with the stone, a fiery round cabochon of beautifully included amber in the exact shade of the autumn sun. It was an extraordinary specimen by any measure, highly domed and with wonderful depth, as though the amber had caught the sun itself, a glow for a golden season to be held forever in its embrace.
In execution, though, the silverwork had to come first. I don’t know any longer whether he created the bezel of the band first, but I suspect the latter. If memory serves, this one was not precisely asymmetrical, but deliberately not even, either: I believe he forged it into a very gentle “V” at the top, where the ends met beneath the bezel. This created a slightly flared effect to either side from underneath the stone: like wings opening, or like the silvered rays of a rising autumn sun, radiating outward from behind the peaks. But before he got to that point, he had to create the band itself.
I’ve written at some length about sterling silver “wire,” which is an industry term of art for length of metal that are melted, poured into exceptionally long, slender molds of various shapes and gauges and even patterns, cooled and then cut to length for use. Gauges range from filament-thin strands that embody the more ordinary definition of the word “wire” to exceedingly solid, heavy blocks of precious metals. The most basic is round wire (and its finest versions are what is used to create twisted silver, such as the variety that Wings frequently uses to edge bezels), but there are half-round, triangle, and square for standard geometric shapes; there is also what’s known as pattern wire, in which the mold is carved with a particular design, and this sort of wire is available in a wide array of motifs; and there is bead wire, in which the mold is shaped on one side like highly-domed, conjoined beads, although it’s usually (but not always) flat on the underside.
The wire that Wings chose for this ring was half-round wire, which is just what it sounds like: rounded on the top side, like half of a circle, flat on the underside; when you look at it from the end, it’s essentially a half-moon shape. It’s one that opens the design of a given piece diverse possibilities, particularly given the selection of sizes and gauges in which it can be found. Wings selected a relatively light gauge and narrow width here . . . but he cut three separate pieces of equal length. Then he arrayed them side by side, sides touching, and fused each one seamlessly to the next through careful solder work. Done right, the inner band shows no trace of the fact that they were once three discrete pieces, and the outer band is given additional texture and depth and substance.
Once the solder work was complete, the band cooled to a smooth and silken finish, he would have shaped it gently around a mandrel to give it that slightly flared “V” at the top. Then he would have set to work on the bezel.
I noted above that this bezel design is something of an informal series for him; as the links above demonstrate, he has four of similar shape (but unique stones and silver patterns) in current inventory. This one was, similarly, not his first; he has made them with garnet and moonstone as well, and perhaps a few other gemstones, over the last couple of decades. They are deceptively simple in appearance: a plain, low-profile bezel to hold the stone, set atop a backing cut freehand to extend only millimeters beyond the bezel’s edge — just enough to provide a little flare, and flair, enough to open up the setting and allow the stone to settle in the embrace of radiant light.
Easy of to describe; much harder to do with this kind of evenness and consistency. The backing must be cut evenly in a perfect circle and filed smooth; the soldering of the bezel to the backing must also be seamless, so that the sides appear to rise organically from the base. This one also differed very slightly from the current crop (although at least one or two of the garnet ones were of similar style): It featured a layered bezel, two concentric circles stacked atop each other, one visibly broader than the edge of the bezel and one that extended only the slightest degree beyond it. Once all of the layers were complete and fused together to his satisfaction, he set the band upright in a miniature jeweler’s vise, set the backed and layered bezel atop it at the very center, and soldered it carefully into place. [Most of the time, such bands can be easily sized simply by opening up the join beneath the bezel and resetting the ends for a wider width or trimming them for a narrower one, and such would have been the case with this one. Occasionally, though, the band’s design makes resizing impossible, such as with his newest ring, stone set atop a band split and spread into full and open embrace; in such instances, a new band must be created entirely. This one, however, held no such limitations, although if memory serves, the buyer did not even need to have it resized.]
Once the silverwork was structurally complete, Wings oxidized the joins between bezel sides and backing, and between the three pieces of half-round wire on the top side of the band. He then buffed the entire piece to a rich Florentine finish, not white but soft and bright enough to appear antiqued. Lastly, he set the stone, one so highly domed that it needed nothing more than a plain bezel to hold it.
The net effect was a bit like wearing the sun on one’s finger — a way to keep the amber fire of this time and place, season and space, at hand permanently. Like the sun at dawn and dusk now, like the fire of the aspen line cascading down the slopes, it was a glow for a golden season, a wearing of warmth and light.
~ Aji
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