We had to go into town this morning, for what turned out to be a fruitless endeavor, but we took advantage of the trip for other necessities. All the way along, we were struck by the endless fields of gold, seemingly every yard, meadow, and stretch of prairie adance with golden cowpie daisies in full flower.
It’s a sight neither of us has ever seen here before, not to the extent. Oh, sure, they blossom every year in late summer, and there are stretches where the green of the fields (or, in recent years, the drought-burned brown of the soil) is studded with their petals, but we have never seen such a blanketing as this. It, too, is a product of the drought; these flowers have risen where little to no grass exists, another casualty of burned and soil and rains that came to late to heal the land.
But there is green, too, if a fading version now. It was distinctly chilly this morning, and the brisk breeze held an edge as sharp as the blade of a knife. Now, in early afternoon, the clouds have moved in but have failed to cool the air; heat and humidity have our small world in their grip, and the rain is not yet near enough to break their hold. Meanwhile, the leaves are already drying, paling in color and thinning themselves from the branches. After yesterday’s rain, I saw the first yellow aspen leaves upon the ground, more than a month early.
That thinning phenomenon is aleady at work on the slopes of the mountains, too. Each day, a little more bare ground shows here and there, and it will not be long before the aspen line shows itself by virtue of its electric gold robes of autumn. There are, of course, still apparent blank spots on those slopes — not empty spaces, but rather, filled with stands of dead trees, those for whom the drought was too strong, or the rains simply too late-arrived.
But on this day, the dominant color is still rich, still the green of leaf and petal in the late-summer light.
It’s a color that finds expression in this week’s #TBT fetured work, a throwback to eleven years ago, and a vintage-style work that Wings created in tribute to older styles and designs. It’s a ring with an unusual focal, one consisting of five separate gemstone cabochons plus a sixth element, all atop a single base, at the center of an old-fashioned wide, heavy, hand-cut band.
Such pieces almost always begin with the silver, and, as here, with the band itself.
This one was wrought from a fairly heavy sheet of sterling silver, probably somewhere in the vicinity of twelve-gauge. As you can see from the image immediately above, it’s not a hard-edged band, either: In creating it, Wings chose two very old traditional stamps, one signifying mountian peaks and the other an alpine sunrise, and alternated them along each edge . . . driving the stamps so deeply into the silver that the displacement created a perfectly rounded, naturally scalloped edge on each side. If you look at the top side of the band in that photo, you’ll see how smooth and rounded it is — no sharp edges anywhere, and not even an edge that’s beens moothed over with filework. That lovely scalloped effect is created entirely through the depth of the freehand stampwork, and it’s both beautiful and comfortable to wear.
That photo also shows the side view of the focal component: a single backing cut freehand of a middling-heavy gauge of sheet silver, shaped with the saw to follow the lines of the five cabochons and the small silver flower. All five bezels and the flower were soldered securely to the backing, placed to align wth the relevant edges of the backing; the back waas then soldered into place atop the band.
The stampwork motifs that Wings chose, coupled with the deliberate “displacement” method of scalloping the edges, immediately mark the piece as one wrought in an intentionally vintage form and shape and style. But this one pays tribute designs from fifty years ago and more with the little sterling silver flower (which you can see more clearly in the image at the top of the post). These are made very simply, cut freehand of lightweight sterling silver and stamped with a stamen and five petals — using, for the first, a round-centered convex circle, and for the other five, a plain hoop-shaped sstamp of the same size. These were ppular designs in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, and as with the old-style feather overlays, it used to be possible to buy cheap commercially-made ones for quick and easy overlays, but Wings doesn’t use those. You can see from the flower’s slightly irregular edges that it’s cut freehand, and it’s domed lightly in the opposite way from repoussé, making the top concave (like a real flower) instead of convex. He cut the edge of the backing to match a stretch of two of the petals, and soldered it into place.
Meanwhile, he had cut the opposite edge of the backing to follow the lines of the five caobchons he’d chosen for the piece — the leaves to fan out beneath the flower. In truth, I’ve always had difficulty seeing this one as simply a single flower and leaves; it has also always made me think of a flower within a flower, with the silver blossom at its center and the soft greens of the stones simply larger petals of an unusual hue. I suspect it’s ultimately intended to work both ways.
For the three central cabochons, Wings chose three small ovals of old green turquoise, so old and so long in his collection that neither of us could swear to mine provenance now. They could be Royston, since seafoam greens were not uncommon to the material it produced, but looking now at the matrix color and wispy patterning in them, I suspect that they might have been green Bisbee, a less common variant from a mine that has long since stopped producing. Over the decades, he acquired a great deal of beautiful original material some of it very old, and these small natural cabochons look to me like part of that.
In a way, more puzzling are the two round cabochons at either end. They look, at first glance, as though they couold be jade, but there’s something just a little off about that idea, in terms of both color and matrix patterning. They were more green than the turquoise, and yet with a hint of blue underlying the color; they were partially translucent, but with a very obvious “frosted” appearance that owed to fine inclusions throughout each stone. They look like green aventurine, and I suspect that that is exactly what they were, although when, where, and how he came to acquire them remains a complete mystery to us both. Back then, aventurine was not a stone he would have ordered deliberately (and might not even have been able to get it from our usual suppliers then) . . . but this frosty round pair could easily have been a part of a larger mixed parcel that he acqired from someone else in trade or purchased from them outright. Regardless of how they came to be in his collection, they added a bit of shimmery green glow to the piece, like raindrops from a summer storm just passed through, still resting upon the leaves.
Taken together, all the combined elements. made for an unusual piece, and yet for one that held a look in common with old traditional-style work of a half-century ago and more. It was purchased by a family member who was taken with the mix of green gems and the open flower that served as its focal.
And it reminds me now, in this season of lush greens already fading, of wildflowers already ceding space and time to the winds of the fall, of the beauty they still give us: the green of leaf and petal in the late-summer light.
~ Aji
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