In light of the new work featured here yesterday, this #ThrowbackThursday seems a good time to highlight the first of the style, a very special commission for a very dear friend.
This work isn’t really much of a throwback at all — only three months or so, to the Christmas holidays. One of our friends, someone dear to both of us who lives on the opposite end of the country, contacted me about commissioning several pieces as holiday gifts for family members, siblings and their now-grown children. She has several of Wings’s works that she wears herself, and knows well the personal power they hold, and she wanted something that would suit the highly individual identities of each of her relatives. And so the process began, actually, with a fairly comprehensive discussion between our friend and me, to identify what she felt were the relevant traits of each person who was to receive one of Wings’s works.
We talked about what each woman did in her professional life, what her essential gifts were, the personality quirks and markers that made her who she was. One of them diverged slightly from the rest: She shared our friend’s love of and connection with wild creatures, of the birds and the butterflies and other wingéd spirits of the air.
At the time, our friend had been engaged in a wildly successful effort to save a clan of monarch butterflies.Her back yard and porch have long been a safe haven for wild spirits of all sorts, from plants to insects to birds — even, notably, an opossum with two infant offspring, seeking refuge from the cold. But climate change had delivered a far warmer fall and early winter to her region than was normal last year, and throughout the autumn, monarch caterpillars continued to appear. She made sure they had a warm, safe space in which to pupate, and nearly all of them, over a period of months, survived metamorphosis. She released them all to find warmer winds, and she also helped me through some very stressful times by sending me photos of them throughout the process.
When it came time to decide on a work for this particular relative, she felt that a butterfly fit the young woman’s spirit perfectly, and wanted Wings to create a pin for her. She and I discussed stones and colors and patterns and what the feel of the piece should be, all the sorts of details that a part of my job to relay to Wings for him to take into account during the creative process. Based on the young woman’s color preferences and luminous personality, our friend asked whether it would be possible to combine orange (perhaps in the form of amber) with a purple stone of some sort.
I knew that Wings had just the thing.
I went out to his studio and sorted through his inventory of stones until I found what I was looking for, then took photos of a pair of stones together and sent them to her. One was the round amber cabochon shown above, one that was especially luminous and refracted the light well. The other was a long, curving flared piece of stone, what remained of a larger cabochon that Wings had used to create a commissioned work for another friend a few years, the shell of a turtle pin. It was a spectacular fragment of charoite, a stone from the banks of the Chara Rier in Eastern Siberia. You can see the portion of the stone that formed the turtle pin here.
The friend who commissioned the small turtle pin wanted a stone in intensely brilliant shades of purple — violets and plums — but the most fitting cab we could find was far too large. It was trapezoidal in shape, with a gently curving base, with most of the dark, intense violet colors at the narrow upper end. The wider, flaring base was a mysterious swirl of plum and violet and pearlescent whites . . . and a beautiful ambery shade, nearly metallic in appearance, but more orange than copper. After Wings created the cabochon for the turtle pin, what remained was this flared base portion, purples shot through with amber.
And so I sent our friend a photo of the amber cabochon atop what remained of the charoite, so that she could see how the amber stone picked up the amber matrix in the purple. She loved it instantly, and so lapidary work immediately became a requirement for this piece.
Wings began, though, as always, with the silverwork. He cut the butterfly freehand from sheet silver, lightweight enough not to pull on fabric once pinned, but solid enough to hold its form and shape. He had been following the monarchs’ progress along with me by way of the photos our friend sent us, and so when it came time to create the design on the wings, he chose imagery that would, to a degree, reflect their beautiful natural patterning. It was never intended to be an exact replica of a monarch’s wings, merely a nod to the spirit of their appearance, and so he chose a combination of orbs and hoops and flowing lines that would summon the image of monarch wings without being confined strictly to that design.
In this instance, he used spare and simple stampwork to create the head beneath the antennae, not wanting to crowd its delicate features with too many cabochons. Then, it was time to create the bezels for the segments of the butterfly’s body.
He used scalloped bezels for both, of varying proportions. The smaller amber stone required a lower-profile bezel, so he chose simple edging that occupied the threshold space between scallops and saw-tooth — not entirely one or the other, but reflective of each, and subtle enough to allow the dome of the amber cabochon to assume pride of place.
The charoite cab took more work.
First, he had to cut and cab it in a way that would capture both the deepest of the purple swirls and the amber matrix, and to do so in a way the placed the matrix closer to the amber cab than to the opposite end. Once he determined the proper layout, he had to sculpt the upper end of the cab in a concave curve; this permitted the bezel to rest gently against the rounded base arc of the amber stone. Once he had the shape outlined and scaled to the appropriate size, he cut the stone in a modified teardrop shape, one that looked a bit like a rounded arrowhead. He beveled and smoothed the edges, leaving a slight rise in the top of the stone (in its original form, it was too flat to qualify as a domed cab, but he edged it enough to give it extra depth, and then raised the interior floor of the bezel so that it would match the amber cab above it.
The last step was the finish. He began with a high polish, beautifully reflective. But something about it nagged at the back of his mind, and so he set it aside for a bit to work on the rest of the order, then returned to it. Still unsatisfied, he reoxidized the stampwork and rebuffed it in a soft Florentine finish — and suddenly, body and wing patterns stood out in stark relief, a fully three-dimensional being that appeared to move and dance and shift, as though ready to take flight.
I took a photo and sent it to our friend so that she could see what it looked like in advance. She pronounced it a perfect fit for its intended recipient.
We are not yet at the point in the year when purple and amber a present here in any real way. Those are colors of the monsoon season and later — the slow dance from summer into autumn, when twilight skies are violet and amber, and the earth is studded with asters in mirroring shades. But spring has come early this year, and I have a feeling that the monarchs are not far off.
When they arrive, perhaps they’ll bring the violet and amber skies of dawn and dusk and monsoonal rains, carried on summery wings and warmer winds.
~ Aji
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