Today, it’s all clouds, heavy with the threat of rain, but as yet unable, or at least unwilling, to produce any.
But we hope.
Meanwhile, the work remains, and Wings is busy with it now. The return of even this small amount of moisture has meant the return of the mosquitoes, too, and in a place where they now carry deadly viruses, the grass cannot be left long. I have other work for the day, but it all has to get done. Still, as we move through our tasks, we find ourselves regularly glancing skyward in supplication, entreating the spirits of the storm for rain.
It may be, as much as our patterns have changed now, that any weather we are granted will only arrive with the dark. Today’s featured throwback work embodies that which once was so rare here, the storms of night. This one was, in fact, a commissioned work, one based closely upon another work that had been offered for ordinary sold and in fact purchased by one of our dearest friends. A stranger happened to see it on the Web site after it had sold, and asked whether Wings could make one like it. Subject to a few very small modifications, so that each would be unique, he agreed to do it.
But I need to detour a bit first before we get to the construction of this piece, because it offers up a stark, clear point about the importance of being able to invest in one’s craft, even when that involves extremely costly materials.
If you recall, the cuff bracelet that we featured in this space in Tuesday’s edition of Red Willow Spirit was built around a very costly focal stone: a smallish free-form cabochon of ultra-high-grade black web Kingman turquoise, one in which the matrix was of the water-web variant. I noted then the high value of the stone, and the fact that it was one of somewhere between twelve and twenty or so such cabochons that Wings acquired some years ago — at very great personal cost to us, I might add. It was the sort of purchase we can make only vanishingly rarely, but it was an investment in Wings’s work: in his art and his craft and his skill and his talent and our faith that he would be able to turn them to good use. He has used them sparingly since, and still has a good half of them left, but the ones that he has used have produced truly extraordinary works of wearable art.
The one in the cuff featured here today, and the cuff on which its design was based, both were built around focal stones from that same acquisition. The stones we purchased that day fell into two primary categories of ultra-high-grade Kingman turquoise: the water-web variant; and the super-fine spiderweb variant. You saw an example of the former on Tuesday; today, you’ll see two examples of the latter.
And these were exceptional material by any measure. Black-web Kingman turquoise of this grade is classified as rare, but we’re not talking the kind of rarity that exists with regard to, say, Lander Blue turquoise, which in fact produced only a hat’s-claim worth of stone. [Yes, it’s true; most of the stuff for sale today that’s labeled “Lander Blue” . . . isn’t.] There is far more black-web Kingman in existence than that, but it is so costly that you don’t often find it in use. And even within its classification, there are grades of quality and rarity and value.
Some of the most phenomenal material I’ve ever seen was used in these two cuff bracelets. The cabochons were unusually large for the type, not especially highly domed, but of an impossibly intense shade of blue: almost pure indigo, just as impossibly tightly webbed with fine matrix the color of ink, and the faintest traces of white host rock floating here and there throughout. They looked positively cosmic, as though by staring into their depths we were seeing some great galaxy long since lost to human knowledge.
The one above was the commissioned work, and we’ll take a close-up look in a bit. But it was based upon this work, called Thundering Sky:
It was built around an unusually large oval cabochon, which in turn was set into a scalloped bezel, trimmed with twisted silver, and elevated ever so slightly above the band. Why? Because the band was a product of anticlastic forging, which creates that concave shape down its length, so that the two edges rise significantly higher than its center. It’s impossible to set a larger cabochon directly upon a concavity of that size and grade. Even if it were possible, the risk of breakage would be too great.
Beyond the graceful shaping, Wings kept the band very simple. He took a single stamp in a traditional thunderhead motif and turned it sideways, alternating its orientation from one stamp to the next so that its open ends were conjoined to create matched pairs throughout. It has the effect of turning a symbol of the First Medicine, the rain, into a motif that points to all of the Sacred Directions, and also evokes the spirit of sacred space. [Indeed, it’s the very pattern that created the spectacular line of negative space in his newest work, completed only yesterday and named, aptly enough, In the Space of the Spirits.] And it was, in fact, the only ornamentation upon the outer surface of the band — but if you look closely at the image directly above, you’ll see hand-stamped butterflies flitting randomly across its inner surface. And if you look at the image immediately below, you’ll see that he kept the finish a soft and velvety Florentine, so as not to distract from the beauty of the stone:
Now, the stone as it appears in the image immediately above appears to have a teal cast, almost greenish. It’s a trick of the studio’s light. The prior photo, showing the blues to be a blend of deepest sky and indigo, is an accurate representation of the stone’s natural color. But this close-up display’s the matrix to superlative effect, showing the tightness of the inky webbing, and the bits of white host rock shimmering like passing stars.
It went to live, as I said, with one of our dearest friends, who now also has a pair of earrings made with focal stones that nearly match it.
But only weeks (perhaps even days) after our friend bought the cuff, someone else happened across its image on our Web site, the result of s simple Google search, if memory serves. She wanted a similar design, complete with the thunderhead imagery and anticlastic shaping, but of utmost importance was the stone. I explained to her that the design would close, but not 100% identical, because Wings is committed to the idea that every piece must be unique to its wearer. I was able to reassure her, though, on the matter of the stone; Wings had one more of similar, although not identical, size and shape and appearance from that same lot:
What is probably not entirely clear from the photo just above is those slight differences. This image is true to the color of both cabochons, and this one, too, was manifest like the stars and space of a miniature cosmos. Its oval shape was, however, slightly shorter, and slightly rounder (and thus fractionally wider) than the earlier one. This one also had tinier fragments of host rock in it, which reduced the star-like effect somewhat. It was, however, an equally extraordinary stone (and an equally valuable one, by any measure), and Wings set about creating the band for it.
He adhered to the same anticlastic shaping, to the same conjoined thunderhead pattern of the external stamping. But where the other cuff was a child of the storm, no matter the time of day or night, this one was all Night Thunder (the work’s name). In the absence of much in the way of stars in the stone, he polished this band to a near-mirror finish, creating an arc like their icy light. And the inner band similarly paid tribute to the spirits of night: Whereas the other cuff’s underside was alive with the butterflies of the summer storm, Wings edged this one, on either side, with a repeating pattern of tiny crescents — small silvered moons that play hide-and-seek with the storm.
These stones were two of my favorites, among all of the stones that have passed in and out of Wings’s inventory over all the many years of his work. That made these cuffs among my personal favorites, too.
And today, looking back at these pieces from nearly five full years ago gives me renewed hope: in the clouds, in the wind, in the summer night sky. The drought remains deep, the pandemic dangerous now. But the thunderheads climb and grow outside the window as I write. And as we work, we shall also spend the day entreating the spirits of the storm for rain.
Perhaps our prayers will be answered with the dark.
~ 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.
