Today was supposed to be a day of rain mixed with snow, the gift of the First Medicine to an earth ready for tilling.
Instead, we’re getting a day of trickster winds, slated to exceed 40 miles per hour from noon into this evening. At the moment, it’s looking as though it’s not going to bother to wait for noon.
The long-range forecast shows a short-term cooling trend, if only by a few degrees, but with high winds, that’s enough to make it feel like winter once again. Still, we’re supposed to be getting rain and/or snow on a couple of occasions within the next week or so, thereafter to grant us an early and unseasonal warm-up well into the sixties. It looks as though we will be planting far sooner than past norms.
Then again, there are no norms now.
The big question that looms over us all now (no, not that one; we are most assuredly planning on coming out the other side of this pandemic safely and well) is one that no one can answer for us now: whether we shall have a monsoon season, and if so, what kind. If we are as fortunate as current factors seem to indicate, we will be granted a good rainy season this year. If so, our faith in the early planting process will prove to be well placed.
People are often shocked to learn that there is a rainy season here (at least in an ordinary year). Outsiders think of this land as desert, and to them that means sand and cacti and drought-as-daily-life, a land where there is no green, and only scorpions and rattlesnakes survive.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Even down in the Bootheel, where temperatures approach those of Death Valley, there remains a rainy season. And deserts of our type are filled with green, even if it’s not the sort that those from the eastern half of this land mass have in mind. Cottonwood and piñon and mesquite, chamisa and sage and wild grasses and flowers, all lend color to this mostly-arid land, and all thrive on relatively little moisture, but up here in the north especially, there is usually a decent amount of moisture to be had, the First Medicine flows here in its own sacred hoop, from the rain to the lakes to the rivers, thence to the earth and back again to air and sky.
Today’s featured throwback work embodies this hoop, and the medicine that flows through it. This one dates back some twelve to fifteen years, one of the entries in his informal series of layered-bezel works, mostly but not exclusively necklaces, that he created around that time. I want to say that this one was from 2008 (and I’m reasonably sure that that was the year it sold), but it could have been created a bit longer ago than that.
And of the whole series, if I were forced to choose a single favorite, this would probably have been it.
You’ll see, between the full image above and the pendant close-up below, that the colors appear substantially different. The one above was shot in natural light, and it’s by far the more accurate of the two; the one below was shot with artificial light, and it appears more green than it actually was. But it was the colors, and the chunky beads and the beautiful, mysterious intensity of the cabochons, that made this one my favorite.
This particular pice consisted of a pendant of three layers: two overlaid layers of sterling silver, plus the bezel/stone combinations on the top. The setting is simplicity itself, a larger square and smaller rectangle conjoined and cut the outline of the stones, one cut slightly larger than the other, the smaller one soldered to the surface of the larger one to create the layered effect. The bezels were utterly plain, simple low-profile bands of silver shaped and soldered into place to hold each cabochon, the larger square at the top and the smaller rectangle arrayed horizontally below it.
As you can see, there’s some slight doming with the cabs, just enough that each would sit securely in a plain bezel, the better to show off their own inherent beauty. Square and rectangular cabs seem to fall into two categories in terms of lapidary work: either very highly domed with extremely low beveled corners, or nearly perfectly flat with no doming at all. Neither is conducive to plain settings, and so Wings usually creates either scalloped or saw-toothed bezels to hold them securely. That he could use plain bezels for these is testament to the care taken with the lapidary work.
And in truth, it was the stones that made this piece. Both are manifest in unusual shades and patterns — not, frankly, what first comes to mind when most people think of “turquoise.” But turquoise they both were, and fairly valuable specimens, too. The upper cab, if memory serves, was about three-quarters of an inch square, while the lower one was probably about five-eighths of an inch long by three-eighths of an inch or so high. And both were likely the sort of turquoise that meant that this piece, even at the values of day, sold woefully underpriced.
There are only a few mines that produce truly green turquoise. Those that manifest in electric lime-green shades., like some Carico Lake and Damele and Orville Jack can thank the presence of faustite in their mineral mix. Some Damele is paler, in seafoam shades that seem nearly white; so, too, is it the case with Pixie and Stennich and some of the other Nevada greens. [Colorado also is known for producing green turquoise, but mostly in deeper shades.] The upper stone here, if I had to guess, was probably either Pixie or Damele; in either case, of a high grade, with a good hard pale stone and fine dark webbing on the diagonal on the right half of it.
The lower stone is also green, but far deeper in hue and far busier in matrix pattern. This is the emerald shade found in Colorado mines, like the old King’s Manassa product; it also appears in some of the Nevada mines, particularly in the larger Royston District. What’s different here is that it has impossibly fine, tight, orbicular webbing, such as that you might see in genuine Lander Blue turquoise . . . but here, it’s not inky black webbing, but a deep bronze-y brown, overlaid with slight whorls and clouds of golden-colored matrix on the upper axis. That “cloud” effect is classic Royston, but the tight webbing is decidedly not. The matrix pattern is much like Number Eight turquoise, but the stone color is all wrong.
So what is it?
My best guess is Indian Mountain, one that produced small stones of hard, fine material, mostly indigo blues like Lander but occasionally in the deeper green shades, top. Its matrix resembles that of Lander, too, with those tiny orbicular patterns, but in terms of color, it can manifest in anything from black to coppery red to bronze to golden brown. It’s some of the most beautiful turquoise in existence, and I suspect that this was one that got away, for a price far, far below its real value.
I suspect that Wings decided on the beads as an afterthought, however, probably originally assuming that he would hang it from sterling silver snake chain. Why? Because of the bail. He creates the bail when he creates the setting, and as you can see, this one is very small — a simple short piece of hand-cut sterling silver, flared at the center with a narrow taper at either end, then bent gently into shape and soldered into place. It creates a tube-like opening at its top, perfect for stringing on chain. Not so perfect for a chunky strand of beads, though.
Occasionally, he’ll begin a piece with one idea in mind, and feel moved by Spirit to go in other directions as it takes shape. I suspect that it what happened here: that when he saw the bold effect of the cabochons he had chosen for the setting, he decided that it needed to hang from something commensurately substantial. [And that was a good choice, to my mind.] The beads he chose were from an old, old strand, smoothly polished large barrel beads, cut to irregular lengths. Such beads are often Kingman (or, now, even more often Chinese, and often of at least as good quality as their American counterparts in the same price range), but scroll back up to the top image and look at the color variation. I don’t think it’s really arguable that these were cut from turquoise from the same lot, and likely the same deposit, and as I said, this was an old strand from his private collection. The speckling of white host rock throughout would normally lend credence to the Kingman theory, but look at the spiderwebbed ones, and those with blocky patches near the top, and the bits of olive green throughout. That, to my mind, says “Royston”; the colors are classic for the Royston material of the day (referring now to when the beads were made, possibly decades prior to the creation of the piece).
But how to make such gorgeous chunky beads work with such a narrow bail?
Simple. You string the chain through, then string the beads on either end — half on one side, half on the other. It produces an effect of the bead strand embracing the bail, rather than its opposite, and still permits the pendant to lie flat when worn, without revealing the chain to either side.
This piece was wrought in the shades of summer green, but it reminds me here less of leaf and petal and blade of grass than it does of water: a fall of rain via Skystone beads, a polling pale lake, both feeding the narrower flow of the Great River. And, in truth, it’s relatively rare that our watersheds here reflect enough of the sky’s color to appear blue; more often, they are deeply, intensely green or pale with the shimmer of surface sunlight.
Whatever the color, they are the shades of summer here, of the First Medicine that keeps our world whole. At this stage, and in the face of all that churns beyond fence and gate, that is reason enough for hope.
~ 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.
