Last month Tom & I drove up to Milwaukee for the annual Bead & Button Show, billed as the “biggest consumer bead show in the world.” For 13 days, an astounding number of jewelry-making classes are on offer, ranging from light-hearted, 3-hour “make & takes” to intensive “fundamentals” workshops, designed to lift your skills from beginner to intermediate in three 8-hour days. (There are even “master classes” for those who are already experts!) But the bead show is more than classes, for during the final days, a marketplace with hundreds of vendors opens up to the public. Here you can buy every sort of jewelry-making tool, supply & product imaginable. And that is what brought us to the bead show this year for Tom wanted to search out a set of forming hammers & I was lusting after more semi-precious stones & glass beads.
For many years now, Tom & I have been developing our jewelry-making skills. At least one or the other of us – separately or together – has worked in glass, precious metal clay (PMC), enamel & metal (both wire & sheet). Whenever I need a jewelry-making “fix” & time is short, I content myself with using my much-adored stones & beads to create bracelets that are colorful, fashionable & easy to wear. But whenever I’m able to free up a block of several days, I get out the kiln & all my tools & settle down to some serious jewelry-making.
I’ve asked myself many times why I have this burning desire – craving, actually – to make jewelry. Aside from the fact that I’ve always loved wearing jewelry, I believe it is tied to a deep-seated need in me to periodically create in 3 dimensions. After all, even though representational artists like me seek to create the illusion of 3 dimensions, drawing & painting amount to putting marks & pigment on a 2-dimensional surface. There is no doubt that I do get a great deal of satisfaction out of achieving this illusion. For instance, I still relish the memory of a specific moment at the easel many years ago when a lotus petal I was drawing suddenly looked like it was peeling itself off the surface of the paper! Nevertheless, over time, I’ve developed – or perhaps, I’ve recognized in me – the desire to work in a medium where I can literally get my hands around what it is that I’m creating.
Even though I often move the pigment around with my fingers while painting, this is a far cry from the twisting, shaping & even hammering involved in wirework. Working with PMC is actually sculpting on a (very) small scale. With lamp work, you have a stick of glass in one hand, a mandrel in the other & a flame whose position must be kept in mind at all times in order to create a viable bead. So with jewelry-making, the emphasis is on your hands & eyes working together; with painting, the emphasis is on your eyes & your mind working together. Of course, your brain is engaged while making jewelry & your hand delivers the pigment to the paper or canvas while painting. But ultimately, for me, the experience of making jewelry resides in my hands while the experience of painting resides in my head. Dare we push this further: The experience of making jewelry is overwhelmingly physical while the experience of painting is overwhelmingly cerebral.
Which is to say that I’m challenged in a completely different way when I’ve got a round nose pliers in my hand, trying to – literally – bend a piece of 20-gauge silver wire to my will than when I’ve got a stick of Sennelier oil pastel in my hand, applying it to my sanded pastel paper. In the first instance, my attention is completely on my hands, which are doing all of the work. But in the second instance, once my hand deposits it, my attention is completely on the paint as the process of observation & evaluation begins inside my head: Is the value correct? Is the color too warm or too cool? Are the shapes right? Soft edge or hard? Step back & check everything. Adjust that now or move on? Of course, I must rely on my hands to help me advance my painting – & I certainly rely on my eyes & brain to tell me how my jewelry project is progressing – but for the most part, making jewelry gets me out of my head in a way that is both enjoyable & restorative.
Finally, making an object with my hands gives me an utterly unique sense of satisfaction. I suspect that this is because all humans, to some degree, possess a need to create objects with their hands, a need that no amount of doing anything else can ever satisfy. Why might this be so? Perhaps residing in us is a remnant of our ancient ancestors, those ancestors whose own hands fashioned the very first tools with which they began the slow, tentative process of influencing their environment, the process that eventually led to the first human settlements & then, to civilization itself. At least I love to think that this is so while I’m bending 20-gauge silver wire with my round nose pliers…