If yesterday was the return of winter, today is all spring.
It’s clear and warm — too warm, but at the moment, we’ll do our best to ignore that — with a mercury already well into the middle-fifties, and virtually no wind at all to turn the icy cold and sharp. Yesterday’s small amount of snow has coaxed an already-abundant green from the earth, fresh blades of grass reaching for the light while the various bindweeds spread further over the surface of a ground that only days ago was bare.
It’s a day to be reminded of the beauty that winter engenders, and of the true gifts of spring that are born of it.
It’s also a day to be reminded what a gift our brilliant blue skies are: an electric shade found in only a few places on earth, courtesy of the stark aridity and clarity of the air, a blend of cornflower and the turquoise for which the local Skystone is named. It’s perhaps no accident that this particular gem, beloved by the peoples Indigenous to this are for untold millennia, is seen as a protective talisman, attached to bows that arrows might fly true or to horse’s manes and tails that they might run swiftly, without stumbling. Even the adobe homes of this land feature blue-painted windows in this same turquoise shade, keeping evil firmly out by bringing home to daily life the shelter of blue skies.
It is this very phenomenon that is manifest in today’s featured work. It’s one of the latest in Wings’s decades-long signature series of Pueblo pins, each saw-cut freehand in a style meant to evoke the iconic shape of the old village’s famed North House. From its description in the Pins Gallery here on the site:
Blue-Painted Windows Pueblo Pin
In the old village homes are blue-painted windows, sills and doorways a bright but gentle turquoise to keep all that is bad outside and to protect those within. With this latest entry in his longstanding signature series of Pueblo pins, Wings honors the ancient tradition, the stone, and the sky from which both draw their beautiful color. The pin is saw-cut freehand in a form and shape that pays tribute to this land mass’s first multi-story dwellings, more than a thousand years old and continuously inhabited. Doorways, stair-stepped rooflines, and the arc at the base that creates a proper fit are all created with the filament-thin blade of a jeweler’s saw. Walls and windows and vigas are all evoked with minimalist stampwork; the traditional ladder is formed, post and rung alike, of individually-cut length of sterling silver half-round wire, soldered securely together and overlaid across the front at the same angle so often found among its real-life counterparts. On the right, the color of the window- and doorsill manifests in a single small round cabochon of Kingman turquoise in the flawlessly clear shade of the high desert sky. Domed for wear, pin measures 2.5″ wide by 1″ high from base to ladder’s uppermost tip; the turquoise cabochon is 3/16″ across (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; Kingman turquoise
$355 + shipping, handling, and insurance
It’s a beautiful tradition, the notion of painting windowsill and doorways the shade of the sky. And it’s one found in cultures the world over, this idea of a particular color as protection — particular gemstones, too. And while this pin does not technically feature blue edges o the tiny windows Wings has stamped into its surface, it’s easy to extrapolate such protections from the talismanic jewel at its center: a tiny round, domed cabochon of Kingman turquoise, pulled from the earth of the neighboring region now mostly called Arizona, a beautiful clear blue like that found directly overhead.
Found, as it happens, on days exactly like this. Yes, it may be too warm; yes, spring may be too early arrived. But we have the shelter of blue skies to protect us, and on this day, it feels like a gift indeed.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2024; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
