It’s another beautiful spring day today, all blue skies and bright sunlight. There’s more of a breeze today, though, a precursor to the heavy winds forecast for tomorrow, and so the air is less warm than recently. Still, it’s alive with birdsong, and while there is no scent of wildflowers yet, at least it holds the tangible promise of summer.
There are also a few more clouds today — perhaps unsurprising since after tomorrow’s winds there’s a small but decent chance of rain in the forecast for Friday. the clouds, too, speak to us of summer, gentle puffs of morning white that by afternoon are transforming themselves rapidly into great climbing thunderheads full of healing rains.
We can only hope (and pray) for such cloud cover this year.
As I write, the winds are rising; the newly-descended strands of aspen pollen are dancing in the breeze. It’s a beautiful day, but a hard one — allergens everywhere, and the promise of more wind and dust to come. We shall need to focus on the possibilities they present — the promise of all the shades of the sun, from dawn to storm to sunset fire, and everything in between.
Today’s featured masterwork, one of Wings’s newer necklaces, represents this possibility, this potential, this promise distilled into tangible form. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
All the Shades of the Sun Necklace
One day beneath an alpine desert sky shows us all the shades of the sun, and all of the medicine of its warmth and light. With this necklace, Wings summons the fiery amber glow of the sunrise and the banded sunset flames to dance with the luminous shimmer that filters through the midday storm. The pendant, cut freehand of solid sterling silver, is built around three spectacular cabochons: at top, an elongated trapezoidal specimen of beautifully marbled Indonesian Maligano jasper, sunny shades of gold and peached veined with the slate blue-gray of trailing stormclouds; bookended below, the golden glow of dawn captured in an oval of agatized amber, and all the fires of the dusk in a bloodstone ellipse, beautifully banded in a gradient of dusty rose and ivory, teal and crimson. All three cabochons are set into scalloped bezels atop a single organic backing, framed on their extended edges by freehand stampwork in a raidant motif. The beads in the strand were all hand-selected to pick up the colors in the cabochons, from rounds of slate gray moonstone banded with peach inclusions to sunstone, gray-white moonstone, cloud jasper, and fire agate, punctuated by giant old amber rondels, faceted Indonesian silver barrels, and freeform nuggets of golden and cherry amber, anchored at either end by alternating rounds of fire agate and bloodstone followed by dusky teal Kambaba jasper. Bead strand is 22″ long, excluding findings; pendant including bail is 3-1/2″ long; pendant alone is 3″ long by 1-5/8″ across at the widest point; bail is 1/2″ long by 1/2″ across at the widest point; Maligano jasper cabochon is 1-3/8″ long by 15/16″ across at the widest point; amber cabochon is 15/16″ long by 5/8″ across; bloodstone cabochon is 1-3/16″ long by 9/16″ across (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown below.
Pendant: Sterling silver; Maligano jasper; agatized amber; bloodstone
Strand: Tri-ply foxtail plated with silver; sterling silver findings
Beads: Gray moonstone with peach inclusions; old amber; sunstone; Indonesian silver; moonstone; cloud jasper
fire agate; amber; cherry amber; black moonstone; bloodstone; Kambaba jasper
$2,000 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This is an extraordinary work, one that is far, far greater than the sum of its parts. Indeed, as I’ve pointed out here before, as I watched it take shape, I was manifestly unsure about what the sum of those parts would become. It would never have occurred to me that three such disparate gems would in fact create a cohesive whole . . . and yet, it’s more than merely cohesive, it’s transcendent.
It’s why Wings is the artist in this family.
I love this work. It’s talismanic in its beauty and power, a power to remind us of the importance of not losing sight of all that is good in a world wounded and beset on all sides by so much that is bad. And it reminds us, too, to honor, and to be grateful for, the promise of all the shades of the sun, one of the rare constants in this season time of catastrophically rapid change.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2023; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
