Early sun has already given way to clouds, sparking hopes yet again that the forecast may be accurate this time. Never mind that yesterday’s storms produced exactly no rain; hope is a stubborn thing, less with feathers than with blinders and earplugs now.
The turquoise of the clear desert sky is veiled now, but still filled with blue: a pale and icy shade up high, floating above the slate and cobalt and violet of the thunderheads. Here, the blues signify not sadness by celebration, not melancholy but medicine. Here, the blues are the shades of the storm and the colors of the sacred lake.
Because here, water is more than just “life”: Water, in all its forms, is the First Medicine, healing, breath and love and growth and survival.
Today’s featured throwback work embodies them all, and takes directly into the heart of the medicine blues. How it got there is another story.
Every once in a while, I use this space to feature some of Wings’s work from my own collection: pieces that he’s given to me; pieces that he’s made expressly for me. This one falls into the former category . . . but it wasn’t always that way.
I know that sounds . . . oblique, to say the least, but why I phrased it that way will become clear. This pair started its life as something very different, a work he intended for sale. But first, let’s get to the how of their creation.
This pair began with the focal stones, a pair of brilliant heart-shaped lapis lazuli cabochons in a perfect cobalt blue, the faintest fragile traceries of shimmering silver pyrite webbing across their domed surfaces. Lapis hearts are not all that unusual, certainly not hard to find — but finding this shade of blue in a matched and domed pair is nearly impossible. Most lapis heart cabs tend to be relatively flat; even when they’re not, the blues tend toward royal blue, at deepest, very often several shades off that. So these felt special.
He fashioned a pair of perfectly spare settings for them, low-profile scalloped bezels and a plain backing cut freehand. That backing, though, extended upward at the top, most of a circle emerging from the throat of the hearts. This was because he planned from the very first to add the tiny round accents cabochons at the top of each. These were set into tony saw-toothed bezels, the serration holding them securely while simultaneously exposing as much as possible of their domed surfaces. These two, if anything, were possessed of a more intense color yet: violet blue, not quite navy or midnight, just the faintest hint of stormy purple infusing their blue glow, like drops of rain beneath a twilight sky.
Before setting those perfect stones, though, Wings had other ideas. He cut, freehand, a pair of large ovals, then excised their centers , creative circles of negative space, and filed the edges smooth. These he stamped in a random pattern of dancing stylized hearts, all around the surface. In the very center of each oval, he hand-drilled a tiny at the top and the base of the upper arc. He then used sterling silver jump rings to attach the bezel-set lapis pendants to the lower part of that arc, and the sterling silver earring wires to its upper edge. The pair became Two Hearts Dancing.
And yet . . . and yet, as happens occasionally, he remained dissatisfied. He returned to them periodically, and finally, one day, he removed them from the case and took their constituent pieces entirely apart. This left him with the jeweled blue pendants, with the drilled ovals, and with the earring wires. He discarded the ovals (and they may find themselves repurposed in a wholly new design later). He added one single, larger jump ring to the smaller jump ring already at the top of each pendant, then attached the earring wires to that. He buffed all of the silverwork anew, by hand, to a medium-high polish . . . and then, instead of returning them to inventory, decided that in the new form they were meant to be a gift for me.
They are smaller, a bit less dangly than most of the earrings that he makes for me, but they have since become one of my favorite pairs. The stones are my favorite shade of blue, and with plenty of blue in my wardrobe these days, I get plenty of opportunity to wear them. But perhaps even more than their color and essential beauty, I love what they represent: the blues of lake and rain, the healing of the water, the gift of the First Medicine, and the love they all embody.
The heart motif has always been one of Wings’s personal favorites; he’s always been a romantic. It’s fitting that he should have settled on their simpler form, spare outlines the very essence of what they signify. After all, at the heart of the medicine blues is nothing less than love, and 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.
