It’s an accusation my father used to level at me regularly when I was a child: “You wear your heart on your sleeve!”
It was, you understand, not a good thing. I was supposed to be stoic. More than that, I was supposed to hide my feelings, good and bad, so that others would never really be sure what I was thinking or what effect their words and actions might have upon me.
Such is the legacy of forced assimilation.
I’ve learned, in the decades since. But I’ve also refused to let that learning change who I am, and for the most part, yes, I do still wear my heart on my sleeve. I’d rather others know me for me than for some artificial construct shoehorned into some alien cultural framework.
For Wings, of course, it’s never been a question. What you see is what you get. He filters nothing, elides nothing, for anyone. It’s what makes his art so utterly singular, so uniquely authentic: Every piece comes straight from the depths of his most essential spirit, given form and shape and meaning by his hands and heart and mind.
We talked yesterday about tears, about how they are the raindrops of the heart. It’s a motif that cuts across cultural lines, this notion of “heart” as symbol and signifier of human emotion, feeling, spirit, soul. It’s also one that has featured prominently in Wings’s body of work throughout his artistic career.
At the beginning of this month, I noted that I would be using our #ThrowbackThursday entries to do something I’ve long wanted to do: to bring some of Wings’s past masterworks to an audience that has never seen them. These are pieces that were made for general inventory and sold years ago, and pieces that were commissions by and for specific clients, often friends, that have never been shown here on the site. Today’s featured item falls into the former category.
It was an unusual design even then, even for him. Wings has always loved the imagery and symbolism of the heart; it speaks to him at fundamental levels, and it finds expression in his work in ways too numerous to count. But this was a piece that was almost the archetypal thing in itself, the essential Heart with a capital “H.”
He made this cuff in 2006; it sold sometime in 2007. It was the only one like it that he ever made. Its genesis lay in the heart-shaped cabochon, one that in life was ever bit as blue as it appears in the photo here. That alone made it unusual: Most heart-shaped turquoise cabs tend to be of less expensive (and less blue) Arizona turquoise, usually Kingman or occasionally Sleeping Beauty. [And these days, it’s becoming possible to find calibrated cabs in that shape made of stone taken from mines in other states; we have one piece in current inventory made with one from Cripple Creek.] This one looked for all the world like Candelaria turquoise, from Nevada, the blue so intense that it approached a pale indigo. The tiny swatch of matrix on the upper left is clearly pyrite, which could mean Candelaria, but I suspect that this one was, unusually for this cut and shape, Morenci turquoise.
Whatever the geographic origin of the stone, it was clearly something uncommon, something that needed a special setting. And so, he decided to let the stone speak. He made the bezel himself, entirely by hand; before soldering it into the proper shape to hold the stone, he stamped its outer edge in a pattern of individual chased hearts. No other adornment; just a small repeating reflection of the magnificent cab that would rest at the center. As he would do with the band, he gave the bezel a slight Florentine finish, a bit of an aged look that matched the shiny leaden color of the pyrite matrix, and kept the focus on the blue of the stone.
But the band . . . . The band was a stroke of genius. And it took me a while to see it. Because of course, I had to put the cuff on, see what it looked like to wear this particular heart on my sleeve . . . and it wasn’t until sometime after trying it on that the imagery fell into place in my mind.
He used solid, heavy-gauge sterling silver round wire to form the band itself, molded and curved and stretched and crimped by hand until it flowed in the shape his soul was seeing. But it only comes clear for anyone else by looking at the band from the underside:
On the wide end of the asymmetrical cuff, he shaped the wire into the twin mounds of the heart’s top. He then stretched each strand straight downward, narrowing them together as he went, until they met in a point that he topped with a second bezel, set with a single round cabochon of spiderweb turquoise.
In effect, the heart wears its own heart.
And the wearer, wherever she is today, wears that compound heart on her wrist.
You might even say that she wears it on her sleeve.
~ 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 owner.
