These are days of heat and haze and enough dust and smoke to choke the sun’s own light.
Late yesterday morning I had gone outside momentarily — these days, I keep my time out of doors as limited as possible to avoid an asthma attack — when I was surprised by a faint buzzing sound arcing in front of me. It was a giant dragonfly, darting and leaping through the silvery ash-riddled air. I caught a faint impression of blue, just a hint, before it disappeared northward: perhaps a blue darner, or a paddle-tailed darner.
The latter is a bold mix of sky-blue turquoise mottled with a rich brown-black on its segmented body, with tiny veins and patches of electric yellow on its head and just above the wings; you can see an example here, at the end of this post. It’s the type of dragonfly I’ve always felt today’s featured #TBT work embodies: boldly segmented, with graceful, delicate wings and that extraordinary clear blue color.
This was, in fact, one of Wings’s earliest works in his sometime, utterly informal signature series of dragonfly pendants. It might even have been the first; it’s been more than a decade, too long for me to recall definitively. This one dates back to those still-summery days of September’s end eleven years ago, and it remains one of the most iconic of the multi-year series.
This one was built around solid sterling silver triangle wire, although, as I’ve noted here so many times, use of the word “wire” is deceptive. It’s a smithing term of art, one that refers to silver (or any kind of solid metal) that is poured as molten ingot into an extraordinarily long mold, cooled, and then released. The molds take all sorts of forms and shapes and sizes too: round, half-round, square, triangle, pattern, bead, twisted or braided, etc. In this instance, it’s what’s known as triangle wire because it consists of three flat sides, a plain underside and two angle upward to a sharp apex, like a pyramid. When the cooled silver is released from the mold, you can see the triangle shape clearly at either end. Sellers retail it by the foot or the yard, cutting it to order. Sizes range from filament-thin metal that does in fact have all the casual and practical properties of “wire” to middling gauges like this one, possibly 12-gauge or so, to solid, blocky nine-gauge or greater, to giant, heavy slabs in the shape of the mold.
Here, Wings took a length of the wire, cut it to size, between one and two inches long, and then tapered the ends by filing them smooth. He then scored five deep lines into it on either side of the apex, creating six separate segments that would form the dragonfly’s body. Then he cut a length of plain narrow silver of a roughly similar gauge, created a long, slender strip that he hammered by hand into a plain look to serve as the bail. This he soldered securely onto the longer end of the triangle wire. He then fashioned two tiny round bezels, low-profile and perfectly plain, and soldered one on each side of the apex just below the point where bail and body were joined. These would serve to hold the turquoise “eyes” when the piece was complete.
Then he turned his attention to the wings.
He used a fairly thin gauge of sheet silver for the wings: fine enough to evoke a sense of delicacy; solid enough to withstand wear without bending. These he sketched out in few short lines on the surface of the silver, rounded the upper wings with a slight top angle on the ends, then tapering the lowering wings at each and creating a flowing, faintly scalloped line across the bottom. These were, I should point out here, one solid piece of silver, not four, or even two, conjoined together. Once he had the vague outlines set, he turned his attention to the detail work.
He began with a short, plain chisel-end stamp, using this in a repeating pattern to score the gently curving lines that separated upper wings from lower. It also gave him a slight angle to follow in a subsequent step, when he would solder them into place beneath the body. Once these lines, clean and spare, were set, Wings then turned to texturization.
Actual dragonfly wings are veined, lacy, translucent affairs that catch the light and refract it back in a silvery shimmer. How, then, to reproduce that thing and fragile effect in solid silver?
To accomplish this, Wings chose another chisel-end stamp, this one dotted along its length with tiny uniform “teeth” that, when hammered onto the surface metal, would transfer a line of diminutive and equally uniform divots. This pattern he chased along the length of each wing on a slight diagonal, so close that they sometimes overlapped: angled downward and slightly leftward on the upper left wing; downward and. just as slightly rightward on the upper right; then changing direction slightly on the lower wings, angled inward to the right on the lower left and inward to the left on the lower right. The effect it produced evoked the veining of actual dragonfly wings remarkably well.
Once the stampwork was complete, he set the dragonfly’s body atop them at the upper center, and soldered them securely into place. He then oxidized all the stampwork, the scorework on the body, and the joins between the pieces, and buffed the pendant to a medium-high polish. All that remained was to set the stones, a pair of tiny yet extraordinarily high-domed round cabochons of sky-blue Sleeping Beauty turquoise.
If memory serves, this one sold without even adding a chain.
It was an immensely popular series, and a style that he hasn’t recreated for some time now. But it seemed fitting for this day when the heat reminds us that summer has not yet departed even as the wind insistently drives the edge of autumn upon us. There are clouds emergent from the pall of smoke to west and south now, and the rising wind has cleared some of the haze from the eastern horizon, a patchwork of clouds and blue showing through above and between the peaks.
Like the dragonfly who paid us a visit yesterday, this is the persistence of summer and its spirits: rain fighting the deliver in the teeth of the drought; spirits of wind and water and light who return even without sufficient resources, because they know it is the one safe space on their migratory path.
In recent years, this season has become deadly, and there will in fact be worse to come. It’s time for us to adopt the persistence of summer spirits, and reclaim a healthy world for our children.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
