On this morning, I’ve been up since just after four. I watched the sky turn from jet to purple to pink before the blue of the day found purchase among the haze of low clouds and piñon smoke in the valley. As the earth spins inexorably toward Autumn. the dawn sky will increasingly awaken in shades of rose and coral.
For early risers like myself, this is one of the most beautiful times of the year. It’s a time when Father Sun arises to don a blanket in hues more commonly associated with the feminine, beginning his journey across the sky in a still and silent and ever-spiraling spectrum of color.
Wings and I are unusual in our approach to this color: Wings loves pink, while I largely dislike it, to put it mildly. It’s probably an artifact of childhood, of people insisting that as a girl, I must like and wear pink rather than the deep brilliant blue that was my favorite. Still, given a choice between something in pink and in virtually any other color, I’ll almost always go with the latter.
Except when it comes to Wings’s work.
He loves rose quartz, and uses it periodically in his art. Most often, it appears in small and subtle forms, an accent stone in a Warrior Woman or Pueblo pin. Such small cabochons are relatively inexpensive and readily available.
Sometimes, he’ll use it as a major element of a piece, as he did in the work we featured here yesterday: Dragonfly, with a body formed of seven round rose quartz stones. I love this piece, and I don’t even like pink.
More rarely, rose quartz will serve as the focal point of a piece, as with today’s featured work, shown in the image at the top of this post. This stone was unusual for its large size, for the fragile beauty of its inclusions . . . and for how it left us.
We have to go back in time seven years. It was the Summer of 2008, and Wings had rediscovered this enormous round cabochon of rose quartz buried in one of the boxes that collectively contain most of his inventory of stones. It sat on his workbench for a while, awaiting its turn in the constant whirl of creativity that fluttered over and around the bench in his studio.
I came out one morning to find that it had found its place, in a celestial setting that evoked the spirits of the sunrise.
It’s a stylized rendering of a Sun Spirit, round face and tablita-style headdress inscribed with other sky symbols. That headdress, its corona of rising rays, was marked by ajouré work: A single round moon setting below a trail of six stars spanning the sky. It was a beautiful envisioning of the dawn, one invoking the number seven that is sacred to many peoples, and culturally significant to many more.
But the stone . . . ! The stone is what made the entire piece. He no longer remembers where or when he acquired it; even at that time, he’d long since forgotten how it came to him. And it was waiting for such a piece as this, one that would displays its mysterious fractal beauty to stellar effect. The back of the bezel, the half that hung below the headdress’s horizon line, was open, allowing the stone to touch the skin, allowing the light to filter through its translucent lines.
It was a remarkable piece.
We took it into the gallery on a Thursday.
It was stolen on Saturday.
It’s neither the first nor the last piece to leave us in that way, but it was one of the most beautiful.
I can only hope that it has since left the thief’s hands, and fallen into those of a person who truly needs the renewing spirit of the sunrise.
~ Aji
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