[gentle music]
*
- We put the 24-karat gold in this little pan
and then add this alloy, 12 and a half percent copper,
12 and a half percent silver.
This is 18-karat gold,
and we're going to cast with it.
The thing about jewelry is, you're trying to make
something that is precious,
something that has intrinsic weight,
not necessarily diamond weight or gold weight,
but something that draws your eye, it pulls you in.
Adornment has been with us forever.
You could find a pretty rock,
but if you found a crystal, whoa!
You know, that light moved around within,
that is a precious thing.
Shells, whoa, beautiful.
It's also materials that you can make something precious.
You can carve it and rub it and polish it
and it looks beautiful.
You can take your creativity and affect it.
This is a good sign, we see gold in there.
We had enough gold to fill it up.
We've let the gold cool in the flask.
There is a process called age-hardening
and the gold is the hardest it's ever going to get
if it cools very slowly in that flask.
Ethan started to cut stones when he was in high school.
At the start of his second year of college,
he said, "I want to come work for you."
[laughs]
And I was so pleased.
Ethan is amazingly tolerant with my advice.
[laughs]
- I just listen to my boss.
- [laughs]
- If we were a big shop, we would have a sandblaster,
something like that.
You have to make do with what you have.
I was fourth out of nine kids,
so I knew, you know, you can want something,
but not to expect anything.
I was raised in Van Meter, Iowa.
That was a very small farm town.
I made it through one year of college
at the University of Iowa.
I decided that college was not for me.
In Iowa city, I bought a jewelry shop,
but I thought I would sell pottery there.
People kept coming and asking, "Could you fix this bracelet?
Could you make me a ring?"
I, all of a sudden, realized I might have to be a jeweler.
I have only been trying to get my laurel leaves
to look like this drawing for,
I don't know, 34 years.
We'd start by drawing the leaves onto the gold
with tracing punches that have less
than a quarter of a square millimeter of surface area.
Chasing moves metal from place to place.
Engraving cuts metal away.
We want movement in the leaves.
We want to feel the air.
We want to feel the wind blow.
We want this punch to walk across the gold.
And even though it appears that I'm hitting that once,
it's actually going prr, prr, prr.
The hammer you hit it with is very important.
This is a Rosewood.
You can hear it actually bounce.
I moved to San Francisco.
I heard that there was a jewelry manufacturer
on Mission Street.
I went, I looked on the board,
Van Craeynest on the fourth floor,
I go up to the fourth floor, ring the buzzer.
"What do you want?"
I said, "I am a jeweler.
I was looking for some work. I have a résumé."
He said, "Slide it under the door."
He wouldn't even open the door.
So I slid it under the door
and Larry Van Craeynest opens the door.
I could look down into the factory
and there were shelves from floor to ceiling
filled with steel dyes, and there was a drop hammer
with gold and black-leaf pin-striping.
As soon as I saw that, I was like, "What?"
This is the mythical nirvana of jewelers,
this is the best thing in the world,
and I just came in the door and I wouldn't leave.
I would go in early every day, work through lunch,
stay after, and Larry, who was not the most patient man,
but he did have patience for somebody who was interested.
Larry believed if you have a beautiful tool,
you can make beautiful work.
He said, "If you want to learn how to engrave,
I'll give you the gravers but you have to make the handles."
If I wanted to learn how to chase,
I had to make my hammer from scratch.
Then you have to make your own chasing punches.
When he gave me a German saw-frame,
he said, "This needs to be rebuilt."
Once I finished that, then I could learn how to saw-pierce.
You lay out the pattern all the way around the ring.
You drill holes in the background,
and then you saw the background out.
We're separating those pieces of gold
that are gonna be the leaves,
the pieces of gold that are gonna be berries
and the border.
You chase it again, you saw-pierce it again,
you polish it all, finish it on the inside,
on the outside, finish the border,
and you do the final chasing,
and then it'll come out like this.
Van Craeynest was so far beyond
any kind of craftsmanship I'd ever run up against.
I worked there for four years
and it changed my metalsmithing life.
This is probably the best piece that I've ever made,
and it started with pieces of lapis lazuli
that were like this.
Because it was already curved,
I knew immediately I wanted to make a bracelet with it.
These pieces of lapis were cut even thinner,
polished on the inside and on the outside,
and sandwiched between the carved gold.
We made the box and stand for it.
This is both a broach and a necklace.
When it is together, that is the object.
These are dragonflies, and I've started to saw-pierce out
for plique-à-joured wings, like this piece.
The wings are open-pierced and then filled with enamel.
In plique-à-jour, the enamel is suspended
by surface tension.
Because it's translucent,
it can add color without overpowering the piece.
It will allow the light.
The Japanese were doing whole plique-à-jour vessels
in the 1860s, 1870s.
It became a jewelry thing in the 1880s in Paris,
Lalique and Maison Vever.
This is exactly the kind of enamel that Lalique would use.
You break off a piece of it.
You grind it into small frit
that is mixed with Klyr-Fire, a gum, and distilled water,
that can then be loaded into the frame.
This is radical cell loading,
and what is holding the enamel there
is the surface tension of the liquid.
We are spatula people and not brush people.
The twisted shank is there
because you have to vibrate the piece
for the glass all to fall together.
The Ada brooch was the best piece of plique-à-jour jewelry
I had ever seen.
It is luscious morning glories,
and some of them are facing you
and some of them are turned away from you.
It was fully articulated.
It was five pieces, it moved on its own.
That just sent the complexity level off the charts,
just the most amazing thing.
I thought, how about I teach a class in metalsmithing
at the Mendocino Art Center,
and Patsy Croft teaches a class
in plique-à-jour, and we'll make a piece."
So you can see that it's very crystalline.
So I'm just gonna load more now.
Something that I thought we could do in a week and a half,
or two weeks, took two years.
We worked on the metal work for 1,200 hours.
Patsy did 800 hours just in the enameling.
We brought it to Sotheby's when we finished it.
The money went to the Mendocino Art Center.
What Patsy and I learned by doing it
was worth every bit of it.
We got to make something close to what the Ada brooch was.
People ask, how do you make work like that?
What I've come up with is five Rs,
refine, refine, refine, refine, repeat.
Jewelry is three-dimensional.
You pick it up, you turn it around,
and each piece that you change here affects this.
We're getting there.
I think I do want to fire it just a tiny bit more
because I want the glass to get smoother and stretch out.
You just work your way through the piece
and then do it again.