As promised, it's time I write a bit about the workshop I attended recently. Perhaps I should say, 'The
amazing workshop I attended recently.' This was the first intensive I've taken with an established, practicing goldsmith. And while
Harold O'Connor's style may be very different from yours (or mine), you can't help but admire the craftsmanship and skill and artistry inherent in his work (and I do mean artistry. At one point, he mock-scolded a student who had asked some practical question about a pin on a brooch, and said, "This isn't jewelry! This is art!" How true).
Clearly, some of his
rings, for example, just don't seem like they're meant to be worn. Rather, they are original art pieces; little objects meant for display and admiration. Which is why it makes sense that O'Connor's work can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Smithsonian Institution. At root, he is an artist whose pallette is metal and stone. Only in some small way would you say he has anything in common with a "jeweler" in the typical sense of the word.
If I seem to be belaboring this point, it's because this was actually quite a revelation to me. While I know they exist, I generally don't read magazines like
Jewelry Artist or
Lapidary Journal, so I'm not really plugged in to the whole "artist-as-jeweler" side of the business, populated with people who make an object as an exercise in itself. If you've ever picked up a book with a title like The Guide To Making Metal Jewelry or Essential Techniques for Making Jewelry or The Complete Jewelry Making Guide (you get the point), then you've seen this kind of thing. A crazy brooch that is utterly unwearable. Or a bracelet that could cause grave physical harm if brushed up against someone the wrong way. While that kind of work can be technically impressive, I tend to be much more interested in the everyday, wearable work made by the handful of artisan jewelers (Beth Orduña, Pippa Small, Ann Sportun, Saundra Messinger) and metalsmiths whose work I follow.
But, having said all that, I learned a
ton just from watching O'Connor work. In fact, most of the workshop entailed him going through the steps involved in this or that complicated technical feat, while we all crowded around the bench and scribbled furiously in our notebooks. I'm sorry to say I didn't get any good pictures (as you can see). I completely forgot my camera the first day, and the second day realized immediately that my batteries were dead. I scrounged around and found 4 very weak batteries in the studio, and was able to take, literally, these three pictures of the workbench: O'Connor's glasses (instead of an Opti Visor, he gets reading glasses with the same magnification); a nugget of amber attached to a metal sheet with a handmade nut and bolt; and his flux brush next to a piece of spectralite (labradorite), his gemstone of choice.
In the end, though, I think these shots actually capture the overall mood of the weekend quite well. There was warmth, comraderie, excessive interest in very tiny things and a fascination with tools of all shapes and sizes. In sum, a group of metalsmiths and jewelers indulging their usually solitary passion with one another, standing around a little bench, watching a master at work. What could be more fun?!
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