What began last night as a lot of wind and a little dusting turned into half a foot of snow overnight.
In the earliest hours of this morning, at the very heart of the storm, half a dozen elk made their way through the white-out to feed off the old hay Wings leaves in the fields, hay no longer good for the horses but perfectly fine for hungry ruminants. It’s rare that we have so few, and all of these save one were large adults. Perhaps they were already separated temporarily from the rest of the herd when the weather hit; they rode out the storm here, and then vanished as silently as they came.
Twelve hours later and the storm has not vanished yet, although it’s assumed a very different form now: The sun is shining, the skies are clearing rapidly, and yet it seems as though the snow is still falling. It’s not. What we’re experiencing here now is what’s known as a ground blizzard, when bitterly cold and powerful winds blow with such ferocity that they pick the already-fallen snow up off every surface and send it flying — usually on the horizontal, occasionally in a whirling spiral. We’ve had plenty of both already, and a vicious single-digit wind chill to accompany them.
When we’re working in this kind of cold, it’s hard to remember why we need to celebrate it, but we know that we do. Even this post-storm deep freeze serves a purpose: It prevents the heavy, wet snow from melting too rapidly in a flooding runoff, permitting it instead to thaw incrementally, soaking the earth as it does so. And that is the gift of the snow’s abundant heart: a gift of snow and storm and season.
This week’s #TBT work, a throwback, as it happens, both to last fall and to two short weeks ago, is in its own way the very embodiment of this gift. There is a history to the creation of this piece, and the name plays a part.
I wrote in this space a few weeks ago of the misfortune that befell one of our dearest friends: While traveling, a couple of pieces from her collection of Wings’s work went missing. The piece highlighted in the #ThrowbackThursday edition was a successor, if not an exact replica, of the more costly of the two missing necklaces (both that original and this replacement edition were holiday gifts from her husband). And as I also wrote at that time, we discovered in short order that the supply-chain problems bedeviling so much of the world were also affecting us now: It took weeks of concerted research to find anything remotely suitable as a replacement focal, and even then, I could not find one anywhere that looked much like the original.
At the time, which was October or November, if memory serves, Wings and I discussed the situation. He had me continue to search for a replacement focal to match the stone in the second missing work, on the theory that if we found one, he could recreate it and present it to our friend as a Christmas gift. Unfortunately, the supply chain had other ideas.
You can see the original necklace here: at its simplest description, a large green turquoise heart with a tiny coral accent, hung from old sterling silver beads. It was one of the works that Wings included in his one-man show all those years ago, and it was entitled Abundant Heart.
You see where this is going, right?
We thought it would be a relatively straightforward matter to find another Royston turquoise heart cabochon of the same size and similar stone color and matrix pattern. It was anything but.
Oh, I found multiple turquoise hearts out there: some large, some small; some blue, some green; some perfectly clear, some finely webbed. Not a single one matched up. the one in the original necklace was both a medium-large size and also lightly domed, giving it a smooth, glossy, almost glassy finish. The Royston material was a velvety green gradient, from emerald to jade to seafoam with the faintest hints of blue and back again, with delicate traceries of gold-colored matrix. That’s fairly standard for a lot of Royston material, and so I expected to find something similar fairly easily.
I was soon set straight on that.
Our online sources had nothing in stock that was remotely similar. If the size was right, shape and shade were wrong; in point of fact, I never found a single one that was a match for color and matrix. Meanwhile, the clock was ticking, the calendar’s pages turning, and we needed to get the other necklace to her husband in time for the holiday. In the process, we stopped at the supplier in Santa Fe with whom Wings has done business for decades; it was there that the original stone used in this piece came from, and we thought it would be a straightforward matter of simply paying enough for a similar replacement.
As it turned out, they had nothing in the same size; their heart cabochons were smaller, undomed, flat-topped and sharp-edged. Of their entire inventory, including several in various shades of green, only one came anywhere close to the green and gold mix of the original: the one shown above. So we snapped it up, but Wings knew then that he would not be able to come close to duplicating the original; too many factors were already off.
That turned out not to be the only problem.
If you look at the setting above, it seems simple enough: The heart cabochon, in rich mottled shades of emerald and teal with a bronze-gold patchy matrix, is set into a low-profile scalloped bezel, edged with twisted silver, and accented with a tiny round coral cabochon offset at the top [wearer’s] right. But look again at that twisted silver. It’s not ordinary, plain twisted silver; it’s an alternating pattern of twisted and smooth silver that creates a wonderful effect that makes the stone pop. Now, flip back to the original version: See the difference?
I had finally found the alternating-design twisted silver from an. Albuquerque supplier and ordered it. When it arrived, it wasn’t twisted silver at all; they had substituted something else in the warehouse. When I called to find out what had happened, it took their [absolutely wonderful] staffer and myself a good amount of time to figure it out jointly; item numbers had been reassigned, and the original version, which was in their catalogue, no longer existed. The only version available was a slightly heavier gauge, in the design you see in the photo above. So we ordered that.
By now, it was January, and Wings was working on the other aspects of the piece. He soon realized that the proportions would be visibly different, owing to the smaller size of the cabochon. On paper, it didn’t seem like much, but when you begin creating the pieces in question, even a millimeter or two becomes hugely, very apparently significant. To make it proportional, he used a slightly heavier backing, leaving a little more room around the edge of the bezel for the also-slightly heavier twisted silver. The offset coral accent was perforce slightly larger here; it was the only one remaining in his inventory in that deep natural red color, and the cabochon was larger than in the original. He chose to create a plain bezel rather than a saw-toothed on here. And finally, to bring it all in balance (keeping in mind the smaller focal and larger accent), instead of creating a two-piece articulated bail, he chose to craft an old vintage-style bail freehand, one with deep scoring and texturizing stampwork, to hold all of the elements together.
The final piece would be the strand of beads, and circumstances necessitated changes here, too. Those in the original strand were old silver beads from Wings private, personal collection — a collection that now has only a handful of beads remaining, nowhere near enough for even the smallest necklace. But he did have a strand of hand-made sterling silver beads available: contemporary, from another Indigenous artist, with each bead made entirely by hand in a seven-stage proprietary process. Absent any possibility of old vintage beads, these were perhaps as perfect an alternative as it was possible to find (and a much more costly one, too).
And they turned out to be the perfect size for the pendant.
By now, Christmas long since over, we had decided this would be a Valentine’s Day gift of sorts for our friend. Wings blessed the piece, and we packed it up with another order and shipped it out. In a sense, I suppose, it’s Abundant Heart, V. 2.0.
And since then, we’ve had two or three snowstorms. Coincidence? Or simply a recognition from the spirits of the season of a similar beauty and medicine, of the snow’s abundant heart?
I don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence.
~ Aji
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