Celebrate the Light in Lapidary Journal Jewelry Artist Jan/Feb 2021

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“Let’s go visit the gates at sunset.” Years after Lapidary Journal Jewelry Artist featured artist Alex Heveri installed her Palace Gates sculpture, a neighborhood couple shared with her their special strategy for difficult days. Whenever they needed a lift, they just headed over and watched the sun sink into the horizon, blazing through her glorious stained glass on its way.

ABOVE: Alex Heveri’s commissioned driveway gate spans 24 feet and includes 9’ tall I beams, just one of which weighs 8,000 pounds. Steel and glass; photo courtesy Alex Heveri

Be Uplifted

Sounds good to me! Even though I can’t stroll over to this driveway from the other side of the country, I feel lighter just looking at the picture. Heveri and two other outstanding light artists are featured in “Today’s Illuminati” in Lapidary Journal Jewelry Artist January/February 2021.

Sarah Cathcart is a leather artist best known for making hand-tooled, painted masks. Viewing masks as elaborate face jewelry, she’s expanded her wares to include more widely worn leather jewelry items, too. Inspired by medieval monks toiling away over illuminated vellum manuscripts, Cathcart brings a witty and contemporary aesthetic to this centuries-old art.

Zee Haag’s “paintings” are wall hangings of gem or mineral slices set in backlit metal “canvases” to create their stained-glass effect. For many years a gem and mineral dealer, Haag now depicts crystals, plants, and animals of the natural world in his art. He also speaks most directly about the spiritual element to his work, though all three of these artists draw heavily on long and rich spiritual traditions.

“Uplift & Soothe,” this issue’s Trends report, covers Pantone’s color picks for Spring. After the turbulent, sometimes tragic, sometimes tedious year of 2020, I think we can all appreciate colors selected with these goals in mind. Announced after presstime, the Color of the Year is Ultimate Gray. Mostly I want to be uplifted more than soothed, but I have to admit it’s an excellent shade for showing off colorful jewelry.

Play of Light

All visual artists pay attention to light. For facetors, bouncing that light around and back up to the viewer is pretty much the point. Bringing out the best color in whatever light the cut stone is apt to be seen in is important, too. Gem cutter and designer Jim Perkins has been tinkering with just the right angles on facet designs for decades and keeps finding new things to try. His choice of amethyst for his latest oval cut is right on trend.

Jewelry artist Lexi Erickson works with cabochon gems a lot. They don’t usually sparkle, but they do look their best in good light, too. A pink to purple stone, lepidolite was her recent her choice for a pendant, also a good pick for Pantone’s Amethyst Orchid.

Once in a while, a typically unsparkly nontransparent gem material sparkles anyway. That’s the case with some lepidolite. Lepidolite is actually a mica, and the material used for gemstones is lepidolite finely dispersed in and coloring quartz. When the mica crystals are big enough, they can make a stone shimmer or sparkle outright, and sometimes you can see them with the unaided eye.

In “Ready, Set, Move,” Debra Hoffmaster makes a pendant set with labradorite. That’s a gem that can look just gray from some angles, but shimmer and flash with beautiful peacock colors when the light hits it just right. To improve its flash average when worn, she’s set the stone in a bail that moves with the wearer. She based this finding on a design she learned to make from Don Vercellotti.

Whether nearly solid color, scattered with dark bits of matrix, or displaying dramatic pools of blue floating in darker patches, turquoise is a classic gem. We have three turquoise projects in this issue, each featuring a different type of jewelry and a different type of turquoise. Francesca Watson’s “Boho Bolo,” Roger Halas’s “Always In” bracelet, and Jeff Fulkerson’s “Fit for a King” cover ring all celebrate the heavenly shades of this gem.

Inspired? Find the Goods Inside or Online in the Annual Buyers’ Directory

Whenever you’re ready to get to work on any design, check out the Annual Buyers’ Directory (ABD) for the tools and supplies you need — or rather the Directories. This year, as usual, you can find the ABD inside Lapidary Journal Jewelry Artist January/February 2021. You can also view or or download the PDF from www.Interweave.com/Go/ABD. And you can visit our brand-new searchable version.

Find the Latest at TucsonShowGuide.com

Also in all versions of the Annual Buyers’ Directory, Tucson show locations are included for suppliers who have been planning on vending at the Tucson shows. Because many promoters have already cancelled or postponed their shows due to Covid-19, and there are likely to be more changes still, please check TucsonShowGuide.com. That is where all the Tucson Show Guide’s information will be for 2021, and we are updating the site as soon as we learn of new developments.

Merle White is Editor-in-Chief of Lapidary Journal Jewelry Artist.