Well, here in the midst of this odd & challenging time, I'm still going into my studio each night and making jewels. I'm having somewhat of a mixture of feelings, part of me being driven crazy and part of me finding my life more relaxing than usual what with no pressures & deadlines or appointments or much I really have to do. Hmm.
I always really like making jewels but am finding I'm enjoying it more and taking more time to play and experiment and make new things and play with ideas. I'm also doing a lot of drawing and painting and collage work in my upstairs art studio that I call my Artio. We are also doing a lot of planting in our garden and eating out of it every day.That is really a good thing.
If you see a piece in the collage that interest you send me an email and I'll give you more details about it. I'm also going to be working on another website for selling our jewels which I'll let you know about when it happens.
The Los Altos fair that we usually do in May has been moved to the last part of August so we won't be able to do it then since it's the weekend before the Kings Mountain Art Fair which is one of our very best shows. The Kings Mountain show is somewhat up in the air because of the pandemic and it's very possible, even likely, that it won't happen either, likewise for the Sacramento Arts Festival at the end of October which has been our best fair for the last two years. It's possible that this will be the first year that we don't do an art or craft fair since 1969.
Whenever we get to sell again we'll have a really great stock of mixed metal jewels. The collage to the right is a mixture of jewels from the end of last year and the beginning of this one. About half of the pieces were created since our sale at the Caspar Community Center at the end of January.
In some ways I have an odd way of working on jewels, I typically work on 15 to 20 pieces at once, a little on one then a little on another and so on. I also keep starting new pieces almost every day as ideas strike me. I like to get the idea into metal at least a little, that helps keep the idea from getting lost in the shuffle. What happens though is that a significant number of pieces that I start don't get finished right away as I get more involved in others. Periodically I go through the pieces on my workbench and cull out some and keep the ones I find most interesting on the bench, the others go into one of the large collection of cigar boxes I have collected over many years to sit for months, years and in some cases decades before I get to working on them again. There are a couple of dozen of these boxes, I call the contents of them Old Starts. A couple of times a week I'll pull out one of the boxes and look through the pieces to see if anything strikes my fancy and pull out those that do and work on them again sometimes to the point of getting them finished. Sometimes two partly finished pieces will join together to become a jewel. Of course some of these partial pieces will never get finished and will still be in the box when I depart this life. That's OK. Early on I used to feel guilty sometimes when I started but didn't finish a piece but finally realized that this was just the way I worked and became comfortable with that process.
Below are two more images, the first of my work bench with a number of pieces that I am working on. the second is an image of one of the cigar boxes with old starts in it, a couple of them being 10 to 20 years old.
