Another beautiful day today: warm, bright, perfectly clear, not a single cloud to mar the blue of the sky.
It was that way at dawn, too, which is a bit unusual; this month is more usually the one in which the clouds gather in the indigo hours, the better to filter the sunrise with shades of coral and crimson to start the day. Then again, the clouds were almost entire absent last night at sunset, too, despite their their rapid gathering around the horizon in the hour prior to dusk.
Our patterns are different now, and the only predictable thing about them seems to be their utter unpredictability.
One thing that has not changed, of course, is the earth’s angle to the sun now. Autumn here remains a mystical, magical season, a time of blue shadows and silver light linking earth and sky.
This week’s #TBT featured work embodies those shadows and that light: both the cornflower shades of the clear daylight sky and the encroaching and receding blues of night, the former illuminated by the glow of a lowering sun, the latter by an ever-revolving mandala of a million beaded stars.
I chose that last phrase deliberately, because it has significance here. This week’s feature is a very special commission, one that Wings was asked to create to coordinate with an earlier commission, a barrette. Both pieces was made to order for a very dear friend, someone like family to us. She had early purchased one of Wings’s gemstone-bead jewelry trios, a combination of necklace, earrings, and coil bracelet collectively known as The Autumn Elementals: Air. As it happens, the name of each piece would prove prescient for the commissioning of the other two works, but particularly that of the necklace: Shadows Beneath an Unbroken Blue. Each of the three works was a mix of sizes, textures, and colors, with deep intense hues and plenty of shimmer. And because our friend like to have her acquisitions of Wings’s work in complete sets of wearable art — necklace, earrings, bracelet, ring, barrette — last year she commissioned a barrette that would incorporate versions of all the stones in the earrings:
That proved to be no small task. The Dolomite beads in the other works were an unusual deep red, none of the usual pink banding found in most of that material. Eventually, Wings had to use the very last of the beads to make it work, cutting them carefully in half and filing them smooth to turn them into cabochons. Those are the red stone at either edge; the rest of the round cabs are, in ascending order of size, jade, black moonstone, and gray moonstone. And at the center is a marquise-cut jewel of extraordinary shimmering blue, like ice in shadow at dusk.
So where does the mandala come in? Look at the stampwork pattern on either edge. It’s Wings’s hallmark freehand microstamping, chased and repeated for extraordinary dimension and depth. When he sat down to it, he said that he had no idea what he would do, but his hands found the shape and rhythm on their own, and two spectacular half-mandalas resulted, accented with the stones and looking for all the world (or rather, all the cosmos) like the edges of nebulae, an explosion of new stars being born.
Fast-forward to earlier this year. Our friend mentioned that at some point when she was able, she wanted to commission a ring in a particular style and with a particular stone, if possible. She wanted it to be built around a kyanite stone, one to match the center cabochon in her barrette . . . and as it happens, we had purchased those in a small parcel, all in the same marquise-cut shape, and he had a couple of them left [one of the others had already been used in a hair cuff commissioned by another dear friend, which you can see here]. Of the remaining cabochons, I set aside the one with the most intense color for her. And if you look at the photo at the top of this post, you’ll see that, in the right light, the blue was spectacularly intense.
She also wanted one in the style of a ring already visible here on the site, albeit one that has sold: Petals of Sky, which featured an oval cabochon of very old turquoise atop an unusual band. Wings had created the band of sterling silver pattern wire, half-round in shape and molded into a pattern of flowering vines . . . but instead of simply soldering the band into a circle, he split each end and gently stretched the two resulting strands upward and outward, to form a “V” shape. Then he brought them together at the center underneath the bezel; the result created an open, negative-space diamond shape, not unlike an Eye of Spirit, holding up the stone.
In other words, like so:
As you can see, the split in the band descends below the edge of the bezel, so that there is a slight open space on either side of it, making it visible to the wearer — a reminder of a little extra magic infused into the whole of the piece.
For this piece, there would be one more surprise: Look at the backing of the bezel. It’s stamped, freehand, in a repeating pattern of alternating vertical rows of Wings’s favorite stylized point. It’s a design that he uses when he wants to create the effect of waves, like water, and our friend has always been drawn to water symbolism, particularly in its feminine manifestations.
The bezel itself was a work of art, too. For this piece, he decided to saw-cut the bezel all the way around, creating open lines at regular intervals. It’s similar to saw-toothed or scalloped bezels n terms of the spacing, but in this case, the silver between each hand-made cut stands at the same height. It’s particularly good for holding stones in place, and in the light, it creates a beautiful shimmery effect around the cabochon, as though it’s being limned by the very light itself.
And that, in turn, is perfect for this time of year: a cornflower sky that, at certain times of day, appears nearly cobalt in color; a metallic sun that sits just that little bit lower in the sky, just enough wash vast expanses of earth with its glow. Fall is fully here, a time of blue shadows and silver light.
On this day, we have had plenty of both, and will have more before dark.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2023; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
