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PhillipSchmidt

PhillipSchmidt

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Who makes them? What procedures/structures do they use that make them stand out? (eg. setting under magnification).

I would like to showcase the very best jewellers world wide, based on examples of technical perfection. I think this is the best way to establish ''what makes a good jewel''

Photos a must!

Phillip
 
Oh! This is a hard one....
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Jewelry is so diverese that ''best'' is hardly feasible to identify. Everything seems to have already been done in jewelry - it is hard enough to come up with a new idea and it usually takes a short time to see it already made somewhere else (same as with academic papers, I might add
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).

I would bet it is always subjective - even cost being of no concern whatsoever.

At some point I gave up trying to figure out what I like and what not. Weeding out the impulse attractions, the things that stayed on make a very mixed bag. Count colorful metalwork (inlay, carving, surface treatments and pairign ordinary metal with precious in the way of japansese menuki, mokumegane, damscus steel and the like), enamel, Hans Holbain & followers and Solange Azagury Partridge (the plaque pins above all). For me these are ''the best'' as a matter of taste. The pieces give me the impression of having a story to tell (although there might not be any) and feel appropriate for display as for wear.

What is technically great it is dificult for me to tell because of limited insight. As much as I know left me with the impression that there is some relation between technology and task that once broken makes the finished piece show exactly where the ''shortcut'' was taken. An example of this would be cast wire (as in some Lucida style rings and ''woven'' wedding bands). You must know allot more of the sort, I bet
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Be sure I''ll give this thread a second thought
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I know it is tough. Guesses are fine. There is no right and wrong here...

There are definately a lot of jewellers around who have been taught well and know their skills. For the most part the reward is job satisfaction and cudos from your peers.

A small percentage are known, as a good piece of jewellery takes a lot of time, so they don''t operate on the wider market. They make too few pieces.

Not many jewellers actively try to create something new. Perhaps I could draw an analogy to writing a new report each week for 30 years. You have already made everything under the sun, so nothing is going to be new and new for newness sake, probably means bad. On the same vein, you need the oprtunity to go out on a limb and create something special. Business is business, and too many $500 jobs that take twice as long will soon put you out of work.

Perhaps, I should change this question to: What makes a jewell an art piece?
 
Come on guys.

It is not that hard.

Is it?

Don''t we above all know the collective source of good jewells?

Phillip
 
Date: 9/2/2005 9:09:37 AM
Author: Platinumsmith

It is not that hard.

Is it?
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No, I do not know of a collective sourve of good jewels, believe me. And the question is hard. What makes anything a piece of art is misterious enough.

Perhaps for you it is easy to tell, because you know what technical achievement means for all sorts of jewelry. As for me, I have some immage in mind with not many words to make sense of it. Really.

Why do you find it easy ?
 
Date: 9/2/2005 10:29:11 AM
Author: strmrdr
Wink Jones has a guy who does awesome hand made goldwork.
I cant recall his name at the moment.

http://www.winkjones.com/images/hand_made_pendant6.jpg
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Thanks Storm. (Storm sent me a PM asking if I knew where the thread about Bei is, but I don''t.)

His name is Bei van Tiet, a Vietnamese Craftsman here in Boise, Idaho. He is getting quite old and I do not know how much longer he will be available to me, but we have been friends ever since the first day we met, when I hired him as a refugee who spoke almost no English. He now owns a small Vietnamese Market where he sells food and makes jewelry for his mostly Vietnamese clientele.

He and his son are now running a GOB sale and they are planning to move into a small house where they may or may not continue to make jewelry. He has lived a life that would send most of us screaming in terror just thinking about it, and I feel honored to have known him.

Wink
 
Sorry Ana. I was goading you people :-) I suppose anything can be art, and it is purely a matter of interpretation.

I experienced the making of a piece after a break-up which just made itself. It is as dark as it gets. I was 19 at the time. I keep it with the undertsanding that I might appreciate it one day. It shows exactly where I was at at the time. I am embarrased by it. It is hard to finish such pieces and I have destroyed many. Art is in all of us, but the Divinci''s of this world are rare!

People who consistently produce art and give so much of themselves amaze me. The best example I know of are singer, song writers. I am going to see Angie Heart play on Sunday and you should see the state of her before a show and the elation afterwards. Apparantly it is addictive, but I digress.

Thanks for the exaples. The Idaho piece shows a lot of creative force. MM''s works have a story too.
 
Thank you for the kind words about the Idaho piece. Bei is a tremendous person and I have great admiration for him and his family. What happened to him in the War is unspeakable and also to his family who escaped on a boat while we were negotiating their release and ransom from the Vietnamese government.

What the boat people went through is another horrific tale that I do not know how anyone can survive, let alone perpetrate. Suffice it to say that as a Marine I thought I had seen evil while in Vietnam, but I saw nothing compared to what the people who lived their saw.

That Bei lived through that war, got his family here, and still can produce beauty is a testiment to the strength of his charector and his soul.

Wink
 
My deceased friend LayTec smuggled his families possessions in USD, no prizes for guessing where, through minefields into Thailand where he was taken into a refugee camp. He was later sponsored into Australia under the above alias. I have never seen a better worker, nor a better jeweller and I am afraid I have seen only a small portion of what he had the potential to do. He sent all is money back home, even knowing that most of it would not reach his family. He died of a blood disease sadly. I tried to contact him years after he died and I finaly met his mother and we cried together. It was good to see his efforts had come to good, that she was here! I have no first hand knowledge of what he went through, but we spoke about his former life a lot. I was a teenager when I knew him.

I just posted where you first introduced us to your friend, so I won''t go on.
 
Thank you, that is the work of another artist, Ocean Pearlman of Tucson, Arizona. She has done pieces for royalty, both in Europe and in Hollywood...

Thanks to the Internet she also was found by Wink who was fortunate enough that she agreed to work with him on special projects...

Wink, not a craftsman, but fortunate and joyous to know many good ones!
 
You guys have strange names
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This thread got me thinking... but no handy general rules of thumb of what constitutes great jewelry making come easy. However, once one has a certain type of design in mind and a certain simple, qualitfiable goal things get tractable. Perhaps this might be enough.

Here's an example.

As much as I remember, quite a few times it gets mentioned on the forum that the look of 'all diamonds no metal showing' is preffered. Be it about eternity bands with the minimum number of prongs, that four prong-six prong debate, tight micro pave, invisible settings or super thin bezels... these extremes of design try to achieve this goal of producing ice clad rings.

I don't know if you, Platinumsmith, really do have the time and patience to go over each kind caounted above - so I picked bezels. I love them... so that helps. Also, I wanted for a while to find out how on Earth are these made! All I see is a very thin layer of metal blending at a very slightly less than 90 degrees slope into the very edge of the girdle of the stones whether the respective faceted stones are 2mm or 20mm accross. The platinum construction holding the stone is a bit tronconic - wider at the bottom than the girdle diameter of the stone, so there is a very slight 'illusion setting' effect in perspective, especially for the smaller stones. In person is even harder to tell than in picture. I have not seen the ring in the picture, but have other jewels by the same maker done in the same manner.

Here's one example:

greenwhiteyellow.JPG
 
That is what happens when a setter who likes to sculpt gets going. It isn''t hard to do. It is just a matter of fussing over the edges of stones with tiny tools for an age. (Tongue between your teeth, making butterfly noises - I used to be like when I was young).

For the gold. I''d suppose he pierced out the basic shapes, improved them with a file and then set them down over the stone. Then he engraved (& chopped) them one by one, maybe under magnification. The setting may have been half finished before it was soldered into place.

The side stones have tiny claws much like they used to centuries ago. I expect it was done by reducing the metal from cylindrical collets to leave the claws, or adding a claw to the side. The proper technique is probably not that hard, but I don''t know it for sure, having never tried. I suspect the metal has been reduced.

Most of what is done in jewellery is not that hard if you know how, but learning is hard and some skills demand a lot of dexterity (and generally a lot of innate know-how, best learnt from a young age). That is why few jewellers offer more then they know how to do. There is always a lot to know so we are always learning, (however, people always assume otherwise because few other occupations take 5-10 years to be competent at). I am saying this because what seems hard might be easy and what seems easy may be hard. That is, if you know the trick it should be easy. Of course, at the level of real jewellery, such as you have shown Ana, something’s may be easy to some people and impossible to others. After a while jewellers know what they are good at and often concentrate on that area and in doing so create their own market, as in Winks example.

Technically perfect jewels involve the creator making no short cuts. This involves, getting each edge straight etc, planning 5 steps ahead (because there can an exact form that must be followed to get the construction of a jewel right), and from start to finish making not a single mishap. This type of workmanship can only be achieved when consistently high standards have been maintained over a long period.

It isn''t clear by what I have said above, but it may be like a writer saying what you leave out is what counts.

Phillip
 
I like what you say about planning ahead.

Mark Morrell with his highly liquid polish actually plans for the finished polish in EVERY step of the process and takes great pains to see that the metal is ready for his finish long before time to take the buffing wheel to it. I could not begin to tell the processes that he must take, but do know that it increases by several hours the time needed for each peice, which is a big part of why his work is worth so much more than the typical Stuller type casting house piece.

Wink
 

Hi Philip,




The best jewelry is always hand made, never casted, and is crafted in the traditions of time-honored techniques and complex skilled craftsmanship. Jewely such as those shown below with twin prong, engraving, milgraining, use of 2-tone golds and complex filagree techniques reflects old world type craftsmanship that elevated fine jewelry from the realm of mere ordinary ornamentation to that of wearable art.




You can see from the pictures that none of this jewelry has the problems of bulk casted jewelry with its ugly file marks, messy joints, crimped and wrinkled curves and tinny porosity. A master goldsmith takes pride in creating pieces that are 100% hand made from start to finish, in a process that can take several hours or sometimes even days. Precision hand workmanship creates smoother curves and corners, sleeker lines and a stronger congregation of precious metal and gems, which together creates a superior finely balanced piece that only master created 100% hand made jewelry can have. With hand made jewelry, hours of human and artistic endeavor create a far superior and more elegant refined piece that is truly worth owning.




Even under magnification, these type of pieces are flawless and are as near as tecnically perfect as you can get.

 
This thread has humbled me. As much as I love jewelry, I realize there is so much I don''t understand about it. I''m beginning to think I wouldn''t recognize a "perfect jewel" if it marched up and bit me!!
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Could you experts post some more pictures of what you think might qualify as perfect...in craftsmanship, etc.?

Thanks!

widget
 
Widget, no only you have some already (that deco emerald ring! and the one with the asscher qualify, really) but the design thread for the star ruby makes me think there is one more under way and you know perfectly well what a great piece of jewelry is all about
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Date: 8/29/2005 10:09:13 AM
Author:Platinumsmith

What procedures/structures do they use that make them stand out?
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Do you think they were trying to save on rubies here ? The lattice work for the invisible settings seems more precious than them! Somewhere I have seen a pair of raspberries made like this - all the way around.

Ring%20ruby%20&%20two%20diamonds%20large.JPG
Ring%20ruby%20and%20two%20diamonds%202.JPG


I can't agree more that jewelry is not meant to be scrutinized at 10X and internet pictures have their downside.... but, a gallery I passed by today had a poster on display announcing some exibition of antique jewelry. The hundred fold magnified quarter of a lace-like platinum pin covered the background of the poster: a bit of millgrain shown as large as a small pea - the thing looks perfect, as much as I can tell, down to calibrated rose cuts tucked into the tips of ribbon-like motiffs, probably too small to see anyway. I am not sure I understand why anyone went to such length. If this is what constuties the technically best, perhaps a step back and some reconsidering is not such a bad idea.
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Not that exageration is likely in that direction, sure that. I am trying guess the practical sense of this thread.
 
Author: valeria101
Widget, [I think] you know perfectly well what a great piece of jewelry is all about
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Ana...I know, I know....I'm really lucky to have some great pieces...but I'm not sure at all that I'd be able to tell the difference between "technically perfect" ones and just "great" ones.

Some nerve I know, but I'm posting pics of what MAYBE rates being in this thread. The main reason that I think it might qualify is that the vendor who sold it to me was SO rapturous about the ring's workmanship. It certainly looks good to me, especially considering that it's probably 70-80 years old!

Experts: If you think this isn't "technically perfect", or even isn't completely hand made, speak up! I wanna learn.... (I'll love it anyway!
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widget

utyrh.jpg
 
IMHO this would qualify--picture from Garry H
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Tunduru. Good points, thanks.
The rings are great. I think either the same person who made the rings set them, or that the setter has had a long standing working relationship with the smith. It has to be so, because how else would the stones fit so perfectly. That is, the settings just wrap around the pavilion with an even thicknesses, thus showing forethought of the setter and smith combined. They were definitely made by craftsmen who planned in advance and were able to accommodate for the finest nuances.

Wink I have absolutely no doubt abut what you and Storm say about Mark Morrell’s work. I admire his style and perfection. I have looked at photos of his work many times and never seen a fault. This level of achievement is not easy to come by. I know a lot of jewellers who have great technical skills, but few have gained the right to produce consistently great jewellery, like MM.

Planning in advance is important even in Stuller castings whereby the inside of the setting should be polished before it is set, and that the ring should be custom made from two or more cast pieces, with the parts being perfectly polished before they are soldered. All the filing and shaping should be done at this early stage. The crown should be shaped to suit the stone in the style required, and after it is set, the prongs should be shaped. The end result takes twice, maybe 4 times as long as the usual stuff on the general market.

The mass-market mass-produced area of jewellery is about cost. The competition is often, as it is said to be ‘working for a bowl of rice’, the jewellers who make their jewellery this way have little choice but to forgo the processes that ensure the jewellery looks right. I have seen jewellery made rough this way even with diamonds costing $50k+. Moreover, I personally know retailers who will decline a quote that costs $150 more for a good job (all be it a casting) when they are making $15k on the sale. I make this point to highlight the different qualities available in cast jewellery.

In hand made jewellery the situation is often intensified (especially where there is some creative art involved), but while most jewellers can do a pretty good job on a casting, (if the stone has regular dimensions and the components are properly suited), very few have the customers willing to pay for high class jewellery. Jewellers who can work by hand and produce consistently excellent results as I suspect the ones highlighted above do, are rare.

Ana, that sounds incredible to say the least – that a large poster shows no faults. I expect that you can detect photo rendering at a glance and I dare say these pieces are exceptional.

Widget, thanks for the piece. It looks like a rare gem worked by hand with care to the utmost. I must discount the fact this design is somewhat in vogue – quite possibly it was a predecessor of modern fashion. Nice buy.

Canuk Girl. Interesting ring. The quality is out there. I can’t say much about mass-produced two tone affects because I don’t exactly know how they do it, but machine made perfection is also technically perfect and as shown in your case maybe even more technically perfect then what can be produced by hand. It looks amazing, but the ranges on offer are suited to what the machine churns out and this is not in keeping with old school techniques, and not really art, as such IMO.

On this point I should like to turn this post to post to:

Examples of Old School Jewellery in their best, (older the better)

Cheers,

Phillip
 
"What makes a jewell an art piece?"

I think jewelry certainly breaches the boundaries of classical art when artisinal techniques such as engraving and filigree are employed. Perhaps on a less obvious scale the time put and skill put into a piece, however the questions also envokes the age old quetsion of "what is art?". Regardless, the jewelry of Art Noveau era jeweler Rene Lalique is possibly the best example of a jeweler-artist.
 
I''ve collected a few pictures of ''old school'' jewellery. How''s this one for a start:

art deco_antik_safir-rubin brooch.jpg
 
Going backwards from art deco to art nouveau, how about this?

fairy2.jpg
 
How about this brooch?

a la vieille russie rubybrooch.jpg
 
An art deco bracelet

kozminsky diamond bracelet.jpg
 
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