Today, it’s all blue skies above a fast-fading green.
Oh, there are puffy white clouds everywhere, solitary versions to north and east, spreading into trailing bands to south and west. But nothing that holds any chance of precipitation.
Nothing to break the grip of the drought, or the haze of wildfire smoke.
A new fire started yesterday, due east of us just a short distance. This makes something like the eighth since last Saturday (although one or two of them ignited before then, and were only announced to the public several days later). August is supposed to be the heart of the monsoon season here — wild weather, yes, but the kind that raises concerns of flash flooding in arroyos and low-lying highways, not the kind that brings hot hellwinds, and the flames and smoke pall of hellfire with them.
Our usual patterns are gone now. Summer’s canyons, its meadows and mountain slopes, are burning — or already burned, and its scars given no chance to heal.
This eek’s #TBT featured work returns our focus to a healthier time, one of an alpine earth in balance . . . or seemingly so, anyway. At the time this piece was created, somewhere between 2008 and 2011 or so, that balance was already being upended; it just wasn’t so visible in real time. But we knew that all was not well, even then. We were simply powerless to stop the storm of colonialism and its inevitable effects, already bearing down on us.
This week’s work is a simple one, one of an intermittent and informal series of layered-bezel works that Wings created during those years — mostly necklaces, a few rings, and one bracelet, as I recall. This is one of the necklaces, and I believe one of the later ones in that time frame, set with a single rectangular turquoise cabochon of (now, at least) indeterminate origin. We’ll get to the stone in a moment, but first, we’ll look at the silverwork design.
Some of his works in this informal series involved three or four layers, overlays set atop each other in an inverse of a nested design: the largest piece on the bottom, the layers getting progressively smaller moving upward, but all cut in the same shapes. this one was simpler: one shape partially overlaid atop another, where the upper one also served as the bezel.
One point about the stone here: It was a rectangle rather than a square, and slightly larger than your average calibrated cabochon of this type. At this late date, neither of us recalls exactly where it came from; it was a part of his collection, possibly quite old. Because it was cut with only the slightest doming of the surface, Wings elected to create a plain, low-profile bezel for it — no scalloped edges, no saw-toothed serration, just a simple even line all the way around. Once he completed the bezel, he turned it on the vertical, and set about creating the lower layer.
The underlayer of this pendant was a perfect circle, wrought of a decently heavy gauge of sterling silver. Normally, such evenly geometric pieces are not cut, but punched, and I have no reason to believe that this was created any differently. Done correctly, it permits for perfectly shaped results, with even edges that can readily be filed smooth. Wings chose to create a circle that was of roughly the same proportions as the rectangle of the bezel: a little smaller than the rectangle’s long side, a little wider than its shorter side. He placed the rectangle atop it at just about the midpoint — so that the end of the rectangle ended at the middle of the circle, and the top of the circle hit the middle of the bezel’s back — and then soldered them securely together.
These would be the only layers of the pendant, save, of course, the stone. First, though, the rest of the silverwork, would need to be complete, and Wings kept that as spare and elegant as the rest. He added his hallmark on the reverse, and set about creating the bail, formed of a single length of sterling silver tubing, cut to the length of the bezel’s top side. He then soldered that securely into place as well, and it formed a beautiful roll-like collar for the pendant. Once that was complete, Wings oxidized all of the joins fairly heavily, then buffed the piece to a low polish, just a bit brighter than Florentine. It gave the whole a beautifully aged appearance.
All that remained was to add the chain — sterling silver snake chain, roughly eighteen inches in length, if memory serves — and to set the stone. As noted above, the stone had been in Wings’s inventory for some time, and we can no longer be sure which mining district was its origin. It was a turquoise cabochon, cut into a rectangle shape with a very lightly domed surface and beveled corners, and its color and matrix were unusual: a deep, rich jade green material veined with golden-bronze and inky purple-black webbed matrix. The colors are a clear ringer for one mine, Pilot Mountain in Nevada . . . except that Pilot Mountain material usually manifests with broader, patchier matrix.
There are several mining districts, both in Nevada and in Arizona, that produce[d] material marked by fine black spiderwebbing, usually chert. The difference between that and what appeared in this stone is that this cabochon did not contain what is known as “spiderwebbing,” precisely; instead, it contained long, narrow veins in diffuse lines, not webbed together but running in not-quite-parallel lines. That was true of both the inky purple and bronze-hued matrix here. Moreover, spiderwebbing is most often black or golden-brown, but rarely either purple-black or bronze, as seen in this stone.
But the colors . . . the colors are exactly like the most iconic material that Pilot Mountain produces, deep electric green backgrounds with just a hint of blue, and matrix in purply-black and golden-bronze. Given the thinness of the cabochon, my best guess is that this was in fact Pilot Mountain material pulled from a seam: a very thin (but relatively wide) vein of turquoise between larger layers of host rock material. That would explain the colors, and potentially, the difference in veining styles, with only smaller, more slender inclusions of other materials able to find space within the turquoise over the time (measured on an epochal scale) that the turquoise sat within the host rock.
If you look at the edges of the bezel, you’ll see that they are very slightly irregular, molded to the cabochon itself. That would support the seam theory: Thin nuggets of turquoise, sometimes slabs, sometimes nothing more than slices, tend to be very fragile, particularly around the points of matrix inclusion; accordingly, experienced lapidarists will often leave edges slightly irregular, in order to preserve the cabochon’s integrity. I suspect that was the case here, and it’s a challenge for jewelers when it comes time to set the stone, because that fragility often manifests exactly at the point that the stone is placed permanently. Wings is skilled in such work (although, as you will see in a #TBT entry that will appear in weeks or months to come, skill is sometimes not enough if the stone is sufficiently unstable), and in this case, he was able to place the stone permanently and securely, creating a beautifully elegant whole: traditionally geometric, yet utterly contemporary, too.
The name os the piece, as it happens, was drawn from the unusual veining of the stone, and the color of the background material: Summer’s Canyons, a reference to our local canyons and gorges in the lushness of an alpine desert hot and rainy season. And the way the stone seems to hover over the disc that backs it seems to be a perfectly executed act of an alpine earth in balance.
It’s what our small world here needs now.
~ Aji
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