The melt has begun.
Technically, it began in earnest yesterday, but even so, the day was punctuated by intermittent high winds and an accompanying drop in temperature. On this day, the air is still, the sun riding high and bright in a warming sky, and everywhere, yesterday’s icicles have turned to waterfalls.
The sun subtracts a bit from the dissonance of the last few days, an earth buried beneath a heavy fall of white, yet even the deciduous trees still retaining a remarkable amount of green. That’s especially true in town, of course; the elevation is measurably lower than it is here. But we have an unusual amount of as-yet-unturned leaves, too, and the contrast they provide to the snow is a bit unsettling.
On this day, though, it’s all about the sun: Mercury rising, ice melting fast now, and here a world spangled by sky and storm, earth and light.
It’s day perfect for this week’s featured throwback work, one echoed in those highlighted here on Sunday and again on Tuesday, but this one dating back probably close to a decade, perhaps longer. It’s one of a sometime signature series that Wings has created regularly for somewhere between two and three decades now. Originally intended as winter holiday works, this extensive collection of small pins is in fact perfect for any season here in this land of mountains blanketed by evergreens. And while even some of their kind are struggling this year as a result of this deadly and deepened drought, others, hardier, are absolutely thriving.
Still, the tourist clientele tends to see them as Christmas trees, and given the colonial cultural in which we are all immersed, we know that that is how most of the world will see them. And so when he creates a new group of them, it’s typically at autumn’s end, just in time for that particular gift season. But it doesn’t mean that, to him, born of and for this land, they don’t have a meaning both deeper and broader than a commercial early-winter holiday imported from without.
I have said often that all of these trees, each of them unique in shape and substance and spirit, remind me of the stop-motion-animated trees in the Rankin-Bass children’s Christmas special, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: trees that dance as Burl Ives sings Silver and Gold; trees that bend and roll and tumble win the winds of the great Christmastown blizzard. Like those, they’re are whimsical, lively and seemingly just as animated, shimmering with silver snowflakes and bejeweled with garlands and ornaments. And all of those qualities are summoned directly from the silver and stone by Wings’s own hands.
This one, as I said, probably dates back close to a decade ago now, perhaps longer. It would have been one of probably anywhere from three to six created more or less simultaneously, each in its own distinctive style. This one was given boughs shaped in the classic style, a pointed tip, ornaments and a trunk rooted in the earth via stampwork, and the spangling shine of four gorgeous gems. As with all of the trees, it began with the basic shape, which means that it began with the silver.
Wings cuts each tree freehand; it’s one of the reasons no two are ever identical, although when he’s on a roll, some come close enough to each other in shape as to have outlines that are virtually indistinguishable unless they’re placed directly side by side. He keeps them small, with wide, flowing angles and very tight corners, wielding a tiny jeweler’s saw with an even tinier blade around each corner and curve with skill and precision. Sometimes, he stamps the design before the cutwork; other times, he’ll add the stampwork once the tree’s outlines take shape. Either way, it, too, is entirely freehand, and he usually selects any from two to four different stamps to complete the work. This one consisted loosely of four: a flowering motif and a concentric heart pattern to create the impression of ornaments (or, perhaps, of the falling leaves that currently ornament our evergreen boughs amid the bands of snow); a single Four Sacred Directions design evoking the image of the Zia sun symbol at the very top, which created a tree-topping “star” of sorts for those who understand these trees as symbols of the Christmas holidays; and lastly (and the reason I used the word “loosely” above), a short, plain chisel-end stamp applied in an irregular zigzag pattern to create the appearance of a snow-topped earth at the base of the trunk.
Once the surface stampwork and the cutwork were complete, Wings would have filed the edges smooth and turned the piece over, both to apply his hallmark and to attach the pin assembly on the reverse. This step complete, he would have turned it back upright and turned his attention to the stones.
The number and type of stones and/or other three-dimensional ornaments varies widely, too. One of his current inventory consists of three such “ornaments,” only one of them a stone; the other two are hand-formed repoussé ingot starbursts. Sometimes he’ll mix and match the tiny ingot medallions with the stones. And sometimes he’ll add only a couple of stones, more often three, occasionally four, and in one notable exception, five (a larger center cabochon with four smaller ones arrayed around it as spokes pointing to the Four Sacred Directions at the tree’s center). This one was accented with four separate stones, arrayed from top to bottom in their own zigzagging pattern: turquoise as blue as the sky, with only a hint of matrix; then a rich earthy jade, the color of the last leaves to turn; deep blue lapis, like the snow-filled clouds of a winter storm; and a plain chatoyant moonstone, radiant with all the silver light of the coldest moons.
Together, it created a tree that could just as easily evoke the rich shades of a warming spring, an evergreen summer . . . or an autumn that has invited winter to share it time and space. In other words, a season like the one the last few days have brought us, a shock but also a gift after this year of deadly drought: a world spangled by sky and storm, earth and light, and all the blessings a fast two feet of snow can bring.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
