The dawn fire broke across a cloudless sky this morning, warming a newly-revived earth below. It was one of those rare moments of pure crystalline clarity, a kind only found in the cold season, those months between fall and spring that, whatever the date on the calendar, in that moment still rightfully belong to winter.
It produces an even rarer phenomenon in the skies here, one almost always confined to sunset. But at sunrise on days such as this, the sky becomes not merely radiant but a perfect gradient, from midnight to amber in seamless bands bisected by a momentary green.
Yes, green skies. It only happens here when the air is perfectly clear, and then only in the area of the heavens directly above the spot where the sun lurks below the horizon. It doesn’t last long, just a few moments while the colors rearrange themselves with a subtlety of movement beyond the range of human ken, but if you happen to be watching, it is there. At dusk, it soon melds into the darkening blues above, leaving a strip of shimmering copper just above the earth for a bit longer. At dawn, the blues paling, already receding westward, are swallowed by the sun’s gold and silver glow, and the faint hint of green is soon subsumed by the fire.
For those moments today, the eastern sky matched the earth beneath, a pale shimmering gold underscoring the more shy and diffident glow of new grass. All too soon, the effect vanished into a swirl of silvery light, but it was a reminder that these final days of winter, those already engaged in ceding space to spring, hold their moments of magic, too.
It also reminded me of today’s featured throwback work — one that, like last week’s, dates back only to the days just before Christmas, one in a commissioned collection of nine separate works. All were coil bracelets, special-order entires in Wings’s signature series, The Coiled Power Collections, all made to order in a way intended to evoke the natural world of this place.
This set was commissioned by a very dear friend. In a couple of instances, she specified general color themes; for the remainder, she was content to leave it to Wings to decide the shape and shades and symbolism they should embody. As noted above, he wanted each of them to evoke some aspect of our natural world, elemental powers wedded to ethereal magic. This one was very different from most in its color scheme and stone selection, intended to invoke the fiery force of the dawn.
As it turns out, this morning’s sunrise, now at winter’s end, manifest in the exact shades of this piece.
As I noted here last week, with the gemstone bead pieces (and with others, too, but it’s most noticeable here), Wings ropes me into the planning process. I have his bead (and cabochon and silver) inventory mostly catalogued in memory, and my odd skill for distinguishing so-called “true color” allows me to find what he describes efficiently and to help him combine shades and stones effectively to create the image that he has in mind.
This one was sparked by contrasts: specifically, between the flame-red bands of large polished sardonyx spheres, the serene pale glow of large clear yellow quartz barrel beads, and the icy shimmer of gray Labradorite doughnut rondels. It brought together all the major colors of the dawn in three shapes and shades of stones. The challenge would be to bring them together in a coherent, cohesive way: a contrast that was complementary, not contradictory.
And so, we set to work. He used two types of focal beads in two different ways: first, the giant sardonyx rounds holding space at and near the center; second, the equally large yellow quartz barrels scattered throughout the coil at specific intervals, setting off and being set off by segments of beads in other shapes and shades.
To coordinate, we chose smaller beads in a variety of rounded shapes, from perfect orbs in graduated sizes to doughnut rondels of plump dimensions. The former consisted of medium-sized green garnet, refracting a range of reds and greens and golds, and gold-lip-mother-of-pearl shell in a luminous soft swirl of peach and ivory, anchored by smaller rounds of red and green tourmaline, all evergreen and burgundy night. The latter type of bead consisted of segments of the ice-gray Labradorite described above, and fat glossy rondels of fiery carnelian, shades of crimson and rust, scarlet and blood.
The center of the coil consisted of the sardonyx focal beads, bisected by the yellow quartz barrels, flanked by the red/gold/green mix of the green garnet, with single sardonyx rounds alternating with single Labradorite rondels as separators. On either side, the final banded red sardonyx bead set off segments of ice-gray Labradorite separated by the yellow quartz barrels, then flowing into a cascade of color: the greener specimens of the green garnet, gold-lip mother-of-pearl flanking a short section of blood-red carnelian, and at either end, red and green tourmaline in a green-to-burgundy gradient.
All of the beads are always strung on memory wire, which is a special kind of wire: stainless steel first treated to create its spring-like capacity, like a Slinky, so that it expands and contracts to fit nearly any wrist, then silver-plated to hold a consistent color. It’s a material that’s been around enough decades now to make the style a sort of “contemporary traditional” jewelry form in this part of Indian Country.
This one also had the added symbolic benefit of bringing together elemental spirits: metal, molten and the cooled and shaped; volcanic crystal, born of fire; polished shell from the waters; and other gifts of the earth in the shades of nascent green and pure light. The finished work was called The Dawn Fire.
On this day, the dawn fire was very literally with us, shades and spirits illuminating a world reborn. There will be few, if any, green skies left until fall . . . but the green on the earth is now rising, ready to meet the fall of the light.
~ Aji
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