A Musical Sweep Pin

I have forgotten just how much fun designing pins and broaches can be. The broach designer doesn't have nearly the functional restrictions that the ring designer has. I guess one could nearly do “anything” and then put a pin back finding on it and call it a broach.

This piece was a commissioned by a gentleman in Port Townsend, Washington. He had found this very singular piece of “turtle back rock” while beach combing. The way the matrix fades from top to bottom really fascinated him. He asked me to make a broach for his wife using textured sterling and maybe some moonstone pebbles. I added a dot of blue topaz to help “punch” up the blue in the moonstone. The “sweep” that the moonstone is mounted onto is made of classical sterling while the rest of the piece is made of argentium sterling. The classical sterling takes a dark patina much more dramatically than the argentium and I needed the darkness to make the “play of color” come out in the moonstone.

I'm afraid that I my training in art school was a bit formal and as such nearly all my pieces start as a drawing. As my undergraduate professor C.James Meyer put so bluntly many a time, the most valuable tool any artist has is the ability to draw.

And I have to confess that through the years...knowing where you are trying to go... is a big advantage to bumping along in the dark. Here to the right are some of the final sketchs I made before starting this project in metal.

New earrings this week

It was a fun week in the studio. The hands and the ideas were playing well together and there were no big problems to get in the way. Well... the portable hand wash station keeps leaking all over the studio floor but we can simply unplug that and it will wait for another day.

I have had these two pieces of turtle back rock material for several months now (see the image on the left). I was going to make another "and water cuts rock" pendant from them but I used a piece of chrysanthemum rock instead. I wanted to juxtapose some baroque pearls with the turtle back material to set off the "bumps". The idea of a pair of earrings gave me the opportunity to use twice as many pearls and the concept flew onto the sketchbook and things just took off on their own after that initial representation. Sometimes drawing an idea before it as had time to jell is like talking about a dream. The act of visualizing it changes it to the point that it is nowhere near what it was in your head. In this case nothing got in the way. It just went from an idea to a drawing and then into a piece.

The black basalt and red jasper earrings on the right are what I call "fifties streamline". I feel it harkens back to the look of a fifties corvette. It is what "streamline" was before the science of aerodynamics redefined the word. These earrings were a treat to put together. The mat surface of the basalt adds a purity and starkness to the overall design. They are now with their new owner at home in La Conner, Washington.