The snow is beginning to stick.
It began early this morning, as the faintest of flurries, trading space with an insistent sun behind a pearl gray sky. As the clouds coalesced, holding in the warmth, the flakes receded. We ran errands in town, hoping to finish before any real weather hit; we emerged from our next-to-last stop to a fall of big wet flakes.
Even so, it wasn’t yet cold enough for any real accumulation. That has come later, and with it, a constantly-shifting form and shape to the storm. What remains constant is the shade of the day: earth and sky one color, a world the shimmering white of a winter’s moon.
It put me in mind of a piece from some ten or twelve years ago, one of Wings’s long-running signature series of holiday tree pins. It was, in one respect, remarkably like the one featured here on Tuesday, a much newer entry in the same series that is currently in inventory. So I went looking, and I found it.
Some Thursdays leave me stymied when it comes to finding an appropriate image of the piece I want to feature. At one point, we lost most of two or three years’ worth of photos of Wings’s then-current work, so even the vast amount of artwork I archive here is nowhere close to complete. That doesn’t even include the decades’ worth of work before 2006 or so, when we first began attempting to create a permanent record, both for purposes of the Web site we were then working to establish and for his own personal historical archive.
And then there are all those photos not quite suitable for one reason or another: a bad angle; out of focus; included in a group of items. Today’s featured throwback work falls into that last category, but given how well it fits with the week’s themes, and how like it is to sister piece linked above, I decided to crop it out and make it work.
Now that you know why the image is so comparatively small, and why there’s a bit of another pin visible in the upper lefthand corner, we can get to the substance of the work.
If memory serves, the year that Wings created this particular pin was one in which he created another six or seven besides. It was a remarkably productive year for him across the board, and one in which he was able to spend much more time in the studio during the holiday season than has been the case for some time now. But this one stuck out in my memory — not only because I recalled the cabochon colors ass a match to the one featured Tuesday, but because it was shaped, unusually, and like only two or three others over the years, like a fir whose boughs were loaded with snow.
People of an age to have seen and remember the animated Christmas television specials of the ’60s and ’70s — Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown; Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer; Frosty the Snowman; nearly any Rankin-Bass production — will recognize the look instantly: small stylized evergreen trees, some decorated with garlands and ornaments and tinsel, too, others not, but all out of doors and weighted heavily with snow, so that the boughs, no longer pointed but rounded on the ends, aimed downward toward the earth.
These were those trees.
All of Wings’s holiday trees have their own unique identities: some classic-looking: some heavily stylized, some with boughs tilted upward in a smile; others slightly bent as though dancing; still others, like these, heavily-laden by the latest storm. I have no favorite among the various styles, but these have always called to mind the animated holiday artwork of our younger years.
And these are animated by their own immanent spirits.
Wings creates the trees by sketching a rough outline on the silver — a few quick strokes of the pen here and there, always making sure to use as much of the piece of silver as possible, fitting them in so that nothing goes to waste. It’s less for the outline of the tree than it is to define the parameters for the stampwork, so that there’s no overlap between them. By the time he’s finished with the stamping, much of the penlines have worn away already anyway.
This particular one was made in a group of three, out of a larger collection that year of, I believe, seven to ten total. Of these three, unusually, two were wrought like this, with the heavy-laden boughs, while one featured them pointing upward. And it took a total of four stamps and three stones to bring this one into being.
Wings usually begins with the top and bottom, and here, he chose a traditional four-directions/sun-cycle motif that most recognize as a Zia symbol to serve as the “star” at the top of the tree, It was fitting; here in this place, there is as likely to be sun as clouds touching the tops of the great firs and soldier pines, setting their tips alight. For the base, where the trunk meets the snowy ground, he chose a single point, narrow end aimed upward and joined together in a repeating pattern, to serve as the snowline around it.
Next, he turned his attention to the “ornaments.” He very often chooses natural motifs, such as flowers, to serve as ornaments and garlands, and this was no exception: He selected a traditional blossom design, formed of seven conjoined hoops, and scattered it in a random repeating pattern eight times across the trees branches. He then took a heart symbol and scattered three down the vertical to fill in some of the negative space.
Then he took his jeweler’s saw and cut it out freehand, from the surrounding silver — wending his way up and down, back and forth, letting the blade find each arc and curve and point. Once the little tree was free of the surrounding silver, he filed the edges smooth. Then he set three small round bezels across its surface: upper right, middle left, and lower right. Lastly, he would have turned it over and soldered the pin assembly into place, then oxidized all the stampwork and buffed it to a medium polish.
I don’t know whether he had already selected the stones he planned to use. I suspect not, or at least not with any specificity; more likely, he had a vague idea of the various cabochons in his inventory that would be the proper shape and size, and set the bezels for all three pins before selecting the stones specific to each pin.
How he chooses stones varies: sometimes with purpose, sometimes utterly random. I tend to think, with the three trees he created at once here, that the selection was more random than not, a process of laying out his options and choosing those that spoke to him. Incidentally, it was the same stone and color pattern that would speak to him again a year or so ago: blue turquoise, onyx, and moonstone.
I said on Tuesday that the arrangement in the current iteration made me think of the moon I had witnessed on its descent only that morning, blue skies rising to push back the night. Here, it’s perhaps more fitting yet, and it works both ways: a setting moon drifting downward past the night, the blue of day already high in the sky; or a moon on the rise, pushing the night upward before it, the better for both to supplant the turquoise day.
And then, there are days like this — when the whole world is the color of snow, and there will be no light visible in the night sky at all once the dark comes.
No matter; the light is here by day. We had the pearl-gray sun of morning, and for the remainder of this day, we have a world the shimmering white of a winter’s moon. And, as always, it brings the gift of the First Medicine, of life itself.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
