More rain allegedly on the way, and yet our world this morning is a clear, bright exemplar of October in this place: not a cloud in the sky, only the faintest haze from the new wildfires to the west and the existing one to the south. After dark, the Big Dipper drifts past our bedroom window in the east, its points perfect diamonds against the impossible deep of the night.
This is a season for dreams, of the beauty and abundance of an earth in fall flower, skies of golden light.
Coupled with the themes that have emerged here this week, it reminded me of one of the past entries in another of Wings’s signature series, a piece that was entitled Flowering Moon. The why of the name should be clear from the photo, but it’s only one small aspect of this work, a throwback to, if the file labels are accurate, 2012. This was a work of of dreams and visions, too, a part of Wings’s Spirit Horse series: a horse that came to him in a dream, asking to be given tangible form, and now manifest in scores, at least, of individual pins, each unique to its wearer.
The rough outlines are always much the same, a dream horse racing across the night sky, mane, tail, and fetlocks all flowing gracefully behind him. He may face east or west, depending on his individual identity and orientation; his adornment always varies, especially in stampwork and but also in jewel type and placement. And this one was unusual with regard to the last trait, because it featured a tiger’s eye.
It’s a stone that Wings has been using with increasing frequency in its middling sizes, but until the last few years, it was very rare that this particular gem made its way into smaller pieces, particularly those that are among his signature series. He has tended more toward turquoise for them, coral, lapis, the occasional garnet or moonstone, once in a while jade or onyx or roses quartz. Tiger’s eye? Not so much. As far as I know, it was never any kind of conscious exclusion; it was more that most clients tend to prefer the other stones and colors. But other than this particular iteration of the Spirit Horse, as far as I can recall, the only ones to include tiger’s eye cabochons were two separate commissions, and the stone was chosen to honor the colors of the coats of the wearers’ own horses.
In this instance, both the stone and its placement provide a striking — and unique — contrast with the stampwork. But its selection and placement would come later in the process. As is most often the case, the piece began, in concrete terms, with the silver.
Wings has a template for the Spirit Horse, of course; he drew it out after waking from the dream in which it appeared to him. He uses it to ensure consistency in size and the general outlines of each piece, but that’s about it; after only the roughest of sketches onto the silver, he cuts each one entirely freehand.
And the saw-work process, for this series, involves a great deal of work: precise, labor-intensive, meticulous cutwork with the tiniest of saw blades to produce the rounded muzzle and body lines, the flaring locks of mane and tail and each of the four fetlocks. This process, too, renders every one of them unique, as is the case with truly hand-wrought silverwork. Once complete, he filed the edges smooth, including the small spaces in between the “locks” of mane and tail. Then he turned to the stampwork.
With the Spirit Horse design, the stampwork that results is often complex, but the elements of it tend to be very simple — usually no more than two to four different ornamental stamps involved, in addition to those that provide the horse’s distinguishing features: the single dot that serves as the eye; the arrow points that outline mane, tail, fetlock, and hoof; and, in this case, the flowing lines that set the mane off from the head and neck and create a sense of motion. For this piece, Wings chose three ornamental stamps: a hoop, a crescent, and a flowering blossom motif, itself composed of tiny hoops. He added three of the flowers to the horse’s body, one on the neck, one on the chest, and one on its side. He then scattered hoops and crescents in groups of three and four, sometimes alternating as though to create an image of the phases of the moon, across the horse’s neck, withers, body, legs, and tail, over, under, and around the flower symbols. It was fitting for a horse of dreams, a flowering of vision amid the illuminating light of a great many moons.
Stampwork complete, Wings turned the horse over on a small, specialized anvil, and hammered it gently, repoussé-fashion, into the slight convexity of surface found in traditional conchas. this process of rounding permits the pin to lie properly when worn, without its corners and edges catching on the fabric beneath it. It also gives the piece an added feeling of depth and motion. He then added his hallmark and the pin assembly on the back, then turned it over and carefully fashioned a small round-saw-toothed bezel, soldering it securely into place at the arcing base of the tail. This was an unusual placement; more often, he sets the cabochon on the horse’s side, or occasionally near the base of the neck. In this instance, though, it worked perfectly: The arch of the tail at the top kept the cabochon’s placement central to the overall piece, and because it drew the eye on the horizontal, it added to the feeling of motion in the pin.
All silverwork complete, he oxidized the joins of pin assembly and bezel, and all of the stampwork, too. Then he buffed the entire piece to a medium-high polish, bright enough to be both reflective and refractive of the light without looking artificial. then he set the stone, a rich red-brown tiger’s eye, one small enough that entire cab was captured in the stone’s chatoyant banding, so that it appeared a rich bright rust color on the top, limned in darker brown edges.
I no longer recall the time of year in which Wings created this particular entry in the Spirit Horse series, no do I recall the identity of the purchaser. But its shapes and shades seem perfect for this season. After all, our world here grows increasingly earthy and brown on these nights beneath of cold crescent moon, yet late blossoms still bask in the warmth of the midday sun. We live, for a few short weeks yet, in a world of rich brown and red, copper and amber: an earth in fall flower, skies of golden light.
That will change when the first snow flies, and that day is now not so very far off. Today is a good day to dream the dreams that are the distinctive gift of autumn.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2019; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
