Today’s forecast was for high winds, and by the time the sun had ascended fully into the sky, they had arrived. Now, sometime after midday, they have gained full force, shrieking and howling past the crack in the door, stopping for a moment now, then resuming with new fury.
This is the worst of spring in this place.
On this day, it seems as though the winds are trying to be helpful by blowing up a storm, but they’re not really. there is no real chance of rain in the forecast until late in the day next Tuesday, and while predictions will shift many times between now and then, these clouds, ubiquitous and threatening as they appear, hold nothing but more bluster.
Meanwhile, an earth newly green and drying fast waits for the sky to weep.
Such musings put me in mind of today’s featured throwback work, one that goes back at least a dozen years, possibly more. One of Wings’s sometime and informal series of layered-bezel works, it sold in 2008, if memory serves, but I think it was actually created in 2006. It was, in its way, the simplest of the lot, only two layers of silver with a great deal of visible negative space in its spare teardrop shape. But it was also one of the most complex, too, thanks to a mix of stones that called to mind sky, earth, plants, and light arrayed in a cascade in the shape of the rain: tears to revive the world.
It’s always an open question whether any given work will begin with the silver or the stone. Often, it’s both at once. In this instance, I believe he chose the stones first, their collective shapes driving the choice of the pendant’s geometry. That said, it’s the silverwork that must be created first, and this, while simple in appearance, is a little more complex in construction.
It began with a simple flat sterling silver teardrop, cut to shape and size, its sides filed smooth. Once complete he arrayed the stones in the desired order, a descending gradient of size as measured by their widths, then sketched an outline around them on a separate sheet of silver. This formed a drop-like pattern, too, but of a very different sort, one that followed the lines of each stone closely, extending only a couple of millimeters beyond their edges, all connected to the one above and below . . . save the last cabochon.
You’re probably wonder by now why we would not include the last cabochon in the second layer. Look closely at the amount of space available around it on all sides. It could be done, yes. It would also look cramped and crowded, too busy and bulky. Leaving the final cabochon to rest upon the lowest layer created clean, spare lines, every stone uncrowded and able to shine on its own.
This narrow, elongated layer would be soldered onto the teardrop in a technique called overlay. [Yes, there is a corresponding technique called underlay, used when a smaller or differently-shaped/-patterned piece of silver is soldered onto the underside of the main piece, usually used when there are cutouts or other open spaces in the main piece for the underlay to show through. In other words, the bottom layer of this work, the teardrop? It’s not an underlay.]
Once Wings had the overlay centered properly, he soldered it carefully into place, then turned his attention to the bezels. The cabochons he had chosen were all relatively highly domed, but not beveled too low at the edges, and so he chose to go with simple, plain, low-profile bezels with no scalloping or serration. Once they were soldered firmly into place, he turned his attention to the bail.
In this instance, he planned to hang the pendant from sterling silver chain, so he chose to keep the bail small and spare. It He created an inverted flare of sorts — widest at the center point, tapering to either end — then cut it free of the surrounding silver and gently hammered around the smallest end of mandrel until it formed a loop. This he soldered into space at the very top of the teardrop, front and back to ensure that it held. then all the remained were to buff it — in this case, tumbled to a soft near-Florentine finish — and then set the stones.
The stones were an inspired collection, not a quartet one would expect to find together, yet perfectly complementary nonetheless. At the top was the main gem, a large domed round cabochon of blue Royston turquoise, a perfect robin’s-egg blue with scattered fine webbing and patches of golden-colored matrix — a desert sky webbed with tendrils of clouds lit by a golden sun. The second was especially unusual, yet somehow especially apt for this place where native mica and quartzite make the soil shimmer — a round in earth formed of a brown pearl. Third came the green of the plant world, the trees and grass and petals of summer, in the form of a banded malachite teardrop. These three filled the bezels atop the overlay, but one bezel, rising almost organically from the main piece, remained. And here he placed the sunlight itself, a tiny round citrine so pale and so archetypically yellow that it was barely identifiable as citrine.
Together, they formed a microcosm of elemental forces that make up our world, that birth and nurture it through growth and maturation into something fully formed and realized . . . and through the tears of joy and grief, love and loss that accompany any such endeavor: tears to revive the world, to heal and make it whole.
We need such tears now.
~ Aji
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