July 2010

Fine Tune

Last evening I went to the music tent at the Aspen Music Festival and saw Deborah Voight sing some of Mahlers later compositions. It was music that I am not familiar with, but I loved it. I probably loved it more because I really had no expectation of how it should be played, or can be played at its best. Perhaps the music was extraordinary. It was a true "ignorance is bliss" situation. Dumb and happy was I but, more importantly, inspired.

I really find that music and paintings do more to cultivate creativity than anything. Listen to something foreign and beautiful and you are traveling. I might as well have been in Vienna. It makes me want to make beautiful things. At those  moments the life-goal becomes leaving jewelry behind that charms for generations.  The pursit of money is lost, fame, transient and what remains is a desire to make beautiful things. I get a strange high when a piece of jewelry is finished correctly. I am very rarely impressed  by modern jewelry for a multitude of reasons. The same can be said about my feelings for opera. I have seen more operas and listened to more soundtracks of great recordings then is good for me. I anticipate moments in specific pieces of music and judge the piece based on my former feelings and knowlege of it. When the delivery is great it makes magic. Truly great moments at the opera are never forgotten.

Yankee Bricks

One of the things I like to do in Nantucket is the tree walk. The trees on this island are some of the most spectacular in our country because they have not been exposed to the Dutch Elm virus, in the case of the American Elm, or many of the other diseases that have killed our native trees. The American Chestnut being a terrible loss. Being an island, they avoided much of the natural spread of disease. In the case of the American Elm, it is the most well-preserved stand of trees outside of Central Park. My first jewelry collection was based on the fissured bark of these trees. They are so organic and knarled, and as a very near-sighted youth it was the only part of the tree I could see; nose pressed close to the bark. There was no way I could see the entireity of the tree. I give great credit to my fascination with texture in jewelry to my nearsightedness. Recently, I have gone back over some of the pieces I did in the first collection. Though it is not what I want to do now, with gold at all-time highs (much of the collection was big, heavy gold) I believe the pieces to be really strong. They remain the core of what interests me. I think this evening I will take a walk with my camera and photograph some of the textures that abound on this island. The tentative plan is to use some of the fissure shapes with purple pimple back Mississippi River pearls, as well as do some sea weed dangle drops. This is a wonderful walking island, always something new to find.