This week, we’ve been looking at fire: fire as captured and translated by Wings’s work, and fire as manifest in the spirits, especially those wingéd ones who rule the air, whether they embody the flames, emerge from them, or are simply drawn to their power.
Not all are birds.
With the hottest part of the summer has come the arrival of the butterflies, first the smaller species in ones and twos, now increasingly the larger and more flamboyant species, as well. The whites and sulphurs arrive first, accompanied by an array of mimics who are actually moths. By summer’s end, a particularly large moth that resembles a bird spirit will come to pollinate the late-season flowers, the hummingbird moth.
By mid-June, the fritillaries and other small species have begun to show up, beautiful delicate creatures that dance on the currents in such fast and fluttery constant motion that it’s difficult to see them clearly, much less capture their images in a photograph.
Now, however, as the heat settles in to alternate with a heavy monsoonal pattern, the larger spirits have come to play upon the local air and earth. A few days ago, I saw what might have been a young monarch, but I suspect was an unusually large fritillary; at a distance, its colors seemed a bit too dull, and when we are fortunate enough to have monarchs, it’s usually toward the latter half of the season.
What we do have, unquestionably, are at least one mourning cloak and one Western tiger swallowtail. They’ve already begun feeding off the early blooms; most of the desert wildflowers here will not blossom until the end of this month or into August, so if we’re lucky, they will remain with throughout the rest of the summer.
It’s perhaps appropriate, in light of this week’s theme, that our three largest, most visually-significant butterflies should appear in the colors of flame: yellow, orange, red. True, the mourning cloak is a deep, dark red, maroon tinged with violet-black, but it is distinctly red nonetheless.And they are drawn to the fire of the flowers themselves: the dandelions and the daisies and the roses and the poppies; the pure yellows of the wild sunflowers and the deep orange-to-crimson spectrum of the Mexican sunflowers; the blazing red of Indian paintbrush and molten gold of Indian blanketflower, also known as the firewheel.
The attract these small but powerful spirits, these representatives, in some traditions, of the powerful Little People.
It was, perhaps, what was on Wings’s mind when he made today’s featured piece, a throwback of barely more than two years. The cuff shown above was one he made in the late spring of 2013, and it sold immediately.
Its name was Calling the Butterflies, as our wildflowers here are wont to do. In the good years the small spirits heed the call, and we are blessed with their presence. Three have been years when none of the larger ones have visited, another bit of damaging blowback from human-induced climate change.
The center of the cuff was a cactus-blossom design featuring nine stones of very old natural branch coral, some of the deepest, darkest, most fiery red I’ve ever seen. Eight small round cabochons ringed a larger oval center stone, and all nine were seemingly perfectly matched for color. It’s virtually impossible to find untreated branch coral cabs like this now, in this number and uniformity, and anyone lucky enough to do so would have to pay a king’s ransom to possess them.
The warmth of the stones did not so much contrast with cool, icy silver as lend heat to it. The bezel was left coarsely finished, save for the sterling silver spacer beads separating each “petal,” but the band was something else entirely. Wings took a single slender length of heavy-gauge silver, split it carefully down the center (leaving the shank still whole at either end), and slowly coaxed the strands apart. widening them carefully until the apex would hold the blossom-shaped bezel securely. Before attaching it, he stamped each strand of the cuff with a single repeating symbol: an alternating chased pattern comprising a geometric, stylized butterfly image. On either strand, the butterflies flew up the length of the cuff toward the fiery blossom’s siren song, drawn, quite literally, like moths to flame.
It was, of course, one of a kind, and it’s one that he would have difficulty replicating anyway. Oh, three’s no question that he could easily reproduce a similar band and similar bezel; he could even set it with nine coral stones. But matching the coral in this one would be impossible now: Even if he were to find the same number of cabochons in similar size and shape, finding them in this particular color, and finding them in their wholly natural state, would be costly in the extreme. Such cabochons are now so scarce on an individual basis that, we he to produce this cuff now instead of two years, it would no doubt sell for two to three times its value in 2013.
Still, it’s a beautiful example of workmanship, and if one’s focus is on the blossom pattern and pollination motif, it’s easily translated to a whole host of other stones and symbolism. But in this incarnation, it was one perfect fiery flower, calling the small spirits to sustenance . . . like moths to flame.
~ Aji
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