Category Archives: Handmade is Better Made

The Making of a Masterpiece VI (part 1)

22k/18k hand fabricated Peacock Pendant. The piece is accented with two black opals from the Moonshine Field at Lightning Ridge as well as rubies, sapphires, natural Mississippi pearls and spessartite garnets. Designed and handmade by R. W. Wise, Goldsmiths, Michael Corneau, designer/craftsman.

by Richard W. Wise, G.G., A.S.G.

What is art and is the work of the goldsmith an art at all or merely a craft? This is an ancient debate. Some would argue that the use of precious materials, as opposed to more mundane materials, such as paint and canvas disqualifies the metalsmith and his product from the status and stature of the fine artist. Jewelry is all about the materials, gold, platinum, gemstones, design being viewed as a secondary concern. The objective of the goldsmith, is to decorate the body and decoration is not art.

That the piece pictured left is decorative cannot be denied. Its inspiration hails from the Art Nouveau Movement (1900-1910), with a design iconography that evolved out of the Arts & Crafts Movement, which paradoxically stressed the use of simple non-ostentatious materials and hand craftsmanship. Like Arts & Crafts jewelry, Art Nouveau jewelry utilized naturalistic design, but whereas Arts & Crafts practitioners emphasized the use of unusual and relatively mundane non-precious materials, Art Nouveau eschewed the ideological and abandoned the mundane but retained the emphasis on the naturalistic embracing a a more feminine, sensuous vocabulary partially through the use of precious materials.

It is no mistake that the Art Nouveau Period parallels what has become known as The Gilded Age—neither saw anything wrong for sumptuous decoration for its own sake. Plato reduced art to beauty. Is decoration art or is it something else, I guess you will have to decide.

As is often the case, we began with a client, a magnificent pair of black opals and an idea. We worked with the client over several months. The following images illustrate far better than any words the development of the concept.

Birth of A Concept:

The concept began with a pair of black opals the two peacocks, a perennial part of the Art Nouveau design lexicon. The peacock has been used as a symbol from the time of the ancient Greeks. However, in this case, it seemed particularly useful as a naturalistic excuse to show off the the bird’s plumage using a rainbow of colored gemstones.

Second Preliminary sketch.

Completed sketch

Accenting Color

Finding accents for gem opal is always a challenge. Very few gemstones find a simpatico with opal. In this case; ruby and blue sapphire worked very well, picking up the corresponding hues in the opals, but when it came to the orange tones in the opal, orange sapphire and diamond simply did not work. The only gemstone that the opal would accept was spessartite garnet. Here is the preliminary

layout: In the next post, I’ll share some more images including the steps involved in the hand manufacture of this beautiful pendant. Stay tuned…

Gold and Jewelry Prices in 2010

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As gold prices pass the $1,300 per ounce mark, it might be useful to talk about the relationship between gold prices and the price of finished jewelry. In the late 1970s, during the first gold rush I can recall, prices seemed to go up every week culminating in a peak price of $850 per ounce in early 1979. During this period, we adjusted our prices weekly and often found ourselves raising the ticket price on finished pieces to keep up with our replacement cost.

A Finished Piece of Handmade Jewelry Averages 70% labor, 30% gold:

After the peak things gradually calmed down and gold tended to trade between $350-500 for most of the next two decades. Gold is a material, in handmade jewelry it is normally 30% of the finished price. That means that 70%, on average, is the cost of the craftsman’s highly skilled labor. Paradoxically, the more handwork the less of a factor the actual materials become.

During the go-go late 70s some commercial manufactures thinking to take advantage of consumer awareness of high gold prices, began marketing gold jewelry by weight.

“Don’t worry, the gold is free!”

This was a problem for hand craftspeople. I recall be asked frequently to weigh handmade original pieces. At first I simply refused, but later I developed a standard response. “Don’t worry”, I would say smiling my most ingratiating smile, “the gold is free.” You can imagine the effect on the potential client, like a deer caught in the headlights, stunned speechless. It did provide an opening for me to launch into an explanation of the differences between commercial and handmade jewelry. Sometimes it worked, oftentimes it didn’t.

Brooch, hand constructed of gold sheet and wire.

Using the international gold price to deduce the price of a piece of handmade jewelry is a bit like comparing the price of a wooden house to the cost of a tree. The fact is, no one pays the spot gold price quoted in the morning paper. Craftsmen do not buy ingots, they buy manufactured sheet and wire of a certain size, shape and fineness.

Nobody Pays The Spot Price:

Gold: Manufactured sheet and wire stock

The price of manufactured gold differs from the spot price in the same way that the price of a board foot of lumber differs from the price of a pine tree. It is , in fact, 20-35% higher. Then there is waste. Saw a 1″ circle from a 1″ square of gold sheet and you end up with a certain amount of dust and a few tiny, unusable corners. Unless the workshop generates a great deal of scrap it is not cost efficient to melt that scrap down, make an ingot and roll it out into sheet. We can do it in our workshop, but under 5-6 ounces it doesn’t pay. So the dust and scrap is returned to the refinery for cash or credit of roughly 95% of the spot price. Net loss, 35% of the price originally paid. Polishing then reduces the rough weight by about 10% to yield the lovely hand polished piece of jewelry you see on display.

So, the next time you are tempted to ask a craftsman to weigh a piece of fine handmade jewelry, remember that gold price has a nebulous relationship to a finished piece of jewelry, particularly handmade jewelry. Remember too, craftsmanship counts.

The Making of A Masterpiece IV; Dendritic Agate Pendant/brooch

Hand & Eye:

The creation of a work of art is a process. Sketches are made, revised and a final design decided upon. However, during the course of the process, things change.

One of the larger questions in deciding on the final design for this pendant/brooch, was the complexity and placing of the appliques of white gold on the yellow gold surface of the pendant frame. These tiny branch like elements are meant to echo the natural pattern of dendritic inclusions in the agate itself (image left). The formation and cutting of this rare type of agate is the subject of the article below by Tarun Adlakah.

Both the designer, Michael Corneau and I agreed that too much applique would be too fussy. The question was, how do you minimize this design element without the result looking half-done. Michael came up with a couple of ideas, once the piece was in process figured out a better design which neither of us had discussed.

The finished piece was completely handmade from sheet gold using a saw, hammer, torch and laser welder. This method, known as hand fabrication is the true “handmade” method. The term is tossed about pretty liberally and often used to describe one of a kind pieces made in wax then cast by the lost wax method (cire perdu), but in my view unless you work in the metal itself, the piece cannot be said to be truly handmade.

A majority of the tools used in this process are hundreds if not thousands of years old. Some of the tools, such as the bow-drill featured below can be seen on tomb paintings from ancient Egypt. The laser welder is a new and very expensive tool. It was invented about twenty years ago and allows for precise cold-joining. It is particularly useful for adding the tiny filigree like elements pictured above

Poetry In Stone

by Tarun Adlakha

There are many legends surrounding the discovery of these stones and are mostly fables but it was around 400 years ago that the first documented records of their occurrence can be traced back to. A chance discovery gave birth to this lapidary art that flourished in the reign of the Chandela King Chhatrasal.

There are two primary occurrences of these stones spread over an area of about 50 kms radius in West Central India. The primary occurrence is of secondary river bed deposits in one of the tributaries of the Narmada river that has been weathered down by water and is a regenerating source after the annual post monsoon floods and is often associated with the transparent and more finely imprinted stones while the second inland source is associated with the translucent stones which are again sub characterized according to the regional peculiarities and are mined from the grey green volcanic ash beds at the depths of 40-85 feet.

Chemically these agates are quartz nodules with atypical banding and occasional druzy hearts with a hardness of around 7 on the Moh’s scale. Some nodules have yellow skins though that is again not a typical feature. The impressions though are still a scientific debate though most opinions point to the purely inorganic depositions of iron, magnesium and tin ions while a smaller school of thought believes that these were organic material replaced by ion exchange process over millions of years by inorganic metal salts and agatized.

The cutting process despite the advent of the gem saws has still remained the same for the last 400 years. The finally sorted stones are then sent to the master cutters who use a length of bow string coated with silicon carbide mounted on a wooden stand to slowly grind layer by layer until the dendrite bearing layer is reached. It is a painstaking process because the layers are very fine and the dendritic impressions even finer and not more than a few microns thick. One wrong stroke and a beautiful gem is ruined.