Our theme this week so far has been rooted in color: in the soothing blues and greens of earth and sky. We’ve been spending recent Throwback Thursdays looking at some of Wings’s most spectacular past work, and as it happens, he hasn’t created any truly major works that combine both intense blues and brilliant greens in separate stones (although the majority of them combine the shades in a single stone, turquoise). Today’s featured piece, however, combines lapis’s brilliant cobalt blue with turquoise’s softer green-blue in one simple, simply spectacular cuff.
He made this one perhaps five years ago; it’s now on the wrist of a good friend on the other end of the country. Built around a massive lapis lazuli cabochon, it was named for the waters so sacred to his people. On either side, Sleeping Beauty turquoise cabochons captured the color of the Pueblo sky. At the ordinal points outside the center cab, repoussé cactus blossoms flower, opening to the warmth of sun and sky and the cool proximity of the water.
It’s a piece that appears simple.
Appearances are deceiving.
I remember when he made it, and the amount of fine detail work that went its execution. It began with the band of the cuff itself, which looks like three heavy strands of wire connected together.
It’s not.
Instead, he took one exceptionally wide piece of heavy-gauge sterling silver wire and split it — twice . It’s delicate work; the silversmith has to measure a relatively narrow band evenly and split it carefully, all while not snapping any of the now three slender strands. More, they cannot be split all the way down the shank; to do so would create three wholly separate pieces of wire. They must remain conjoined at either end. In this instance, he added subtle stampwork to each stand of the band: tiny representations of the sacred hoop at spaced intervals. In our peoples’ way, the sacred hoop is a symbol of life itself; in a repeating pattern like this, it can also be used to denote water. It’s a fitting motif for Wings and for the imagery of this particular cuff: After all, in this place, the people know that water is life.
Once the split-work is done, the strands outer must be carefully expanded, spread outward from the center strand to widen the overall band. They can’t simply be pulled apart: first, to do so would create a band with spaces of uneven widths; second, and most significant, it’ll break the strands. So he gently warms the conjoined strands and painstakingly stretches them outward, widening the gaps with slow and careful precision until center is large enough to hold whatever design his vision dictates and the interstices are even at all points across the band.
Then comes the gemwork, beginning with the creation of bezels for the cabochons. The large center cab is first; the oval must be aligned in the middle of the three strands, centered both for length and width. The bezel is soldered securely to the three open strands, making sure that each strand is firmly and evenly attached to the backing. Then he adds the twisted-wire accent, another meticulous soldering job; too much heat, too much pressure, and the wire will melt in into a solid mass, losing its braided effect.
Next come the accents, the bezels for the two smaller turquoise cabs and the four repoussé cactus blossoms. It’s been so many years that I no longer recall definitively the order in which he added them, but looking at the band, I suspect that he placed the small silver blossoms, tiny conchas, first. Each was soldered to the band at the ordinal points of the edge of the large center bezel, edges tucked slightly underneath for smoothness. it added a beautifully balanced, yet subtle accent to each of the outer strands of the cuff’s shank.
Still, it left blank spaces in the inner strand, spaces that he filled with evocations of water and sky combined. He kept it extraordinarily simple: two plain, smooth bezels with no added adornment, into which he set two cabochons of Sleeping Beauty turquoise in a light clear blue, a color somewhere between a robin’s egg and the hue of the western sky at mid-morning.
The final step (before a last buffing) would have been to set the lapis cabochon that forms the piece’s focal point.
And what a stone! The angled view of it in the photo at the top of this post gives the best view of its detail, and it is Nature’s own work of art. Truly, I have never seen a lapis stone as stunning as this, and certainly not in this size. As I said a few months ago, when we featured lapis lazuli in our ongoing Tuesday Jewels and Gems series:
See those gold-colored flecks? Those are not calcite, nor are they pyrite. They’re distinctly metallic, and also distinctly yellow in color. My best guess is that they are actually tiny inclusions of a precious metal, and I’d put money on its being gold. In some of the places where lapis is mined, so are a diversity of precious metals, including gold, and it’s exceedingly likely that some of those metals have, over the eons, filtered into the lapis deposits here and there. The stone in this cuff was truly spectacular; the photo does not do justice to how it looks in natural light.
It’s reflective of the bodies of water in this high-mountain desert area, where the reeds and grasses near the shoreline hold a metallic shimmer in the Father Sun’s slanting golden light. Today, this cabochon would be vastly more expensive for him to acquire (he’d had it for some years before it found its way into a finished piece), and the cuff would be similarly higher in price.
As I said above, the entire piece is deceptively simple. It was relatively labor-intensive to create, although those skills can be taught and learned and honed with practice.
What can’t be taught is the ability to envision such a piece in the first place, calling on such disparate elements and imagery, and then to bring it to fruition in such spectacular fashion.
Wings always says that Spirit guides his work, but there’s an enormous reservoir of personal vision and innate talent pooled together in his eyes and hands and heart, as well. in pieces like this, the depths of that reservoir begin to come clear.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
