Category Archives: The Making of a Masterpiece

The Making of a Masterpiece VI (Part 2)

The finished pendent, steps in making follow.

The wing is constructed of separate elements to give it maximum definition. Here an individual “feather’ has been cut out, drilled for the gem and is prepared to be domed.

Here goldsmith Michael Corneau uses a steel punch to curve a single feather of the bird’s wing.

Ancient Technique of Sand Casting:

Truly handmade jewelry is made in the ancient manner using the metal itself.

Modern commercial and some so-called handmade pieces are actually carved in wax and then cast using the cire perdue or lost wax process. The more ancient method is sand casting. The approach is similar, a model is made and it is impressed into a crucible. In each case the molten gold is poured into a vacancy. Once a mold is made, lost wax can be used to produce multiples.

The total time required for Michael Corneau to produce the Peacock Pendent was 212 hours. This did not count, of course, the time spent developing the concept, discussion and selection of gemstones.

Sand casting the peacock’s body: Molten gold is poured into the depression made by removing the model from the sand.

Setting the gems: Once the feathers have been dapped out and soldered together and the cast body has been finished and soldered to the tail, gem setting can begin, the method is known as thread and bead setting.Peacock Pendant: Micro view, all gems set.

Treasures from Trash, What is Art?

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Head of The Phoenix. The total length of this sculpture by Chinese artist Xu Bing is 110 feet. The weight, 12 tons. The head is a commercial jack hammer. Photo: R. W. Wise

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

At 110 Feet long and weighing in at 12 tons each, the artist Xu Bing’s Phoenix Project currently on view at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art is impressive. It is particularly interesting given my last post in which I asked questions regarding art and the use of precious materials.

Once you get beyond the shear size of them, what is particularly striking about the twin bird sculptures suspended from the gallery ceiling, is the fact that they are totally built from construction waste. That’s right junk!

In my last post, I showed a beginning series of images of a 4 x 1.75″ Peacock Brooch constructed of 22k gold, 18k gold, black opals, rubies & sapphires and asked the rhetorical question, can a piece of jewelry constructed out of precious materials be considered art? Many critics hold that the jeweler’s art, if it is art at all, is a minor one.

So, when my wife Rebekah and I walked into the gallery Sunday, what to my wondering eye did appear but a huge, in fact two huge works of art made exclusively of junk, the very antithesis of or you might say the other side of the coin. Junk had obviously been used as a material to create art, what did that say about the use of gold and gemstones?

Close up of the wing of the Phoenix, note the use of various types of waste found around construction projects. Xu Bing lived in the U. S. for many years, when he returned to China he was struck by the magnificence of some of the new buildings going up contrasted with the dwellings of the poverty striken workers who built them. Photo: R. W. Wise

Close up of the wing of the Phoenix, note the use of various types of waste found around construction projects. The artist used re-bar, flashing, discarded gas bottles and shovel blades among other things to construct his birds. Xu Bing lived in the U. S. for many years, when he returned to China he was struck by the magnificence of some of the new buildings going up contrasted with the dwellings of the poverty striken workers who built them. Photo: R. W. Wise

The first thing that struck me as that the constructions themselves were quite beautiful. It was necessary to focus, to draw the mind away from the contemplation of these wonderful works of art to be able to discern the method and materials of their construction. First you see the whole, only later the parts.

What makes a material precious? It is largely a question of attitude. Gold has been valued from the beginning of recorded time. You need only to see and touch a natural gold nugget to understand the material’s appeal. First the color, in its pure form, gold is a striking orange-yellow. Its weight is reassuring, its touch sensual. Are these attributes simply too seductive to the senses, do they submerge the artist’s intention and make it impossible to convey meaning? Certainly it doesn’t help.

Given the tactile and visual qualities of gold and the connotations of wealth associated with it, it is clearly impossible for anyone to view the object qua object without reference to the material of its construction.

When you view Xu Bing’s Phoenix you are struck by his achievement. When we view the Peacock Brooch are we simply overwhelmed by its glitter?

All That Glitters; The Peacock Pendant: 22k gold, 18k gold, opals, rubies, sapphires, spessartite garnets and natural Mississippi Pearls

Still, there is no denying the beauty and appeal of the Peacock Pendant. Each bird appears to float, each has a distinct attitude, the tiny gems twinkle in the light and the peacocks magnificent tails’ wrap themselves provocatively around a golden bower. They eye is, of course, drawn to the center stones. The two opals exhibit a fabulous flashing pallet of color.

NEXT POST, The Making of a Masterpiece VI (Part 2) MORE IMAGES, STAY TUNED.

The Making of a Masterpiece VI (part 1)

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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…

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

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by Richard W. Wise, G.G.

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.