In every art form there is a period of experimentation, followed by the medium's greatest level of achievement, concluding ultimately in decline. So it is with the art of jewelry, a medium that, like sculpture, demands that the artist command a range of technical skills in working hard materials in order to make tangible his artistic vision. But the art of jewelry, which reached the height of achievement in the work of such masters as Cellini, Castellani, and Faberge, and then declined, is now enjoying a remarkable renaissance. Some of the jewelry being made today rivals the great masters both in technique as well as design. And, unlike the works of those makers, today's production is available to a wide audience, even to people of very modest means.
This work has nothing to do with the gem-heavy creations of such well-known merchants as Harry Winston, Cartier, and Tiffany. Theirs is not so much the art of jewelry as it is the art of conspicuous consumption. Elizabeth Taylor does not sport a work of art on her finger; she wears a rock weighing some sixty carats. Such diamonds are said to be a "girl's best friend" not for their beauty but rather because they can be sold for hard currency. That trio of jewelers and other well-known names are not in the true sense practitioners of the art of jewelry.
Contemporary jewelers of handcrafted works employ techniques as old as written records and as new as space technology to achieve their artistic intentions. Artisans of civilizations of the Near and Middle East from 6,000 years ago would recognize many of the techniques in use today (though not the labor-saving versions of those methods, made possible by electricity).
Modern jewelers reach across cultures, wedding traditional methods to contemporary design. The vocabulary of jewelry making today includes the Japanese methods of mokume and shakado; granulation, a technique that has been "lost" a few times throughout the centuries and which was first practiced circa 3,000 B.C., but was perfected by the Etruscans around 700 B.C.; reticulation; marriage-of-metals; forging; and hand weaving--these are the brush and paints of the jewelry artist. A whole menu of enameling techniques is used quite literally to paint jewels, the closest the jeweler comes to the painter's canvas.
The contemporary appreciation of the jeweler as artist grew into a force over the past two decades. With the exception of a handful of individuals who were actively making jewelry by hand and viewing it as an art form more than thirty years ago, the whole field is scarcely twenty years old. In order to learn an art there must be teachers, and for fledgling jewelry makers teachers were few and hard to find. Several elements had to come together at the same time to provide the right climate: a desire for handmade objects of adornment; a movement away from mass production and synthetic materials; a self-indulgent society with the means to satisfy its desires; and a turning away from the aesthetic values of an older generation.
While some contemporary jewelry is made of fairly fragile materials, such as plastic, paper, and wood, the work discussed here deals with hard metals and stones. We leave behind such terms as "precious" and "semi-precious" and deal instead with durability, hardness, tensile strength, and brilliance.
Gold, for example, has been the
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