3000 B.C. gold, agate, carnelian, jasper and marble.
From the book Treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur. In '98 I went to this show in NY at the Morgan Library and now I am giong back and really looking at the pieces with fresh eyes. This piece in particular is so modern feeling that it is stiking. They used a great deal of lapis with gold and carnelian which I have never been a huge fan of until now.
This morning Darby came to my design studio and held out her hand with a surprise inside. "I don't know what this is but I thought you would like it!" Right away I knew it was an antique money clip with my son's name so beautifully engraved on the front. I just love it.
After being away for two years to take care of her two young girls, Bella and her upbeat attitude, are back at Jeanine Payer. Her favorite piece is the Edmond. She enjoys the process the most, beginning with the cleaning of the casting, ending with soldering the jumprings and antiquing them. She brings the piece to its final stage for the engravers.
Today she is working on the Billie necklace and I caught her soldering one of the jumprings to the chain. She is currently eyeing the Fabienne two-tone earrings which she plans to get for herself as her next piece. Bella is famous around here for her keen eye for both antiquing the poetry and hand-polishing.
-Janet K.
Little Man came to visit before we went to Yerba Buena Gardens and Zeum. We enjoy a labyrinth made of hedges, a carousel from 1906 and a 25 foot slide. The park is a stone's throw away from the studio right in the middle of downtown. The perfect way to decompress after a looong day in my studio working on Valentines Day.
Here is one of my first cast pieces from the early 90's and it is made of bronze, silver with two small rubies. I was very into Frida Kahlo, Mexican Milagros and folk art at the time and this imagery inspired my anatomical heart ring.
And it was at that age...Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others, among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.
I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.
And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.
Pablo Neruda
translated by Alastair Reid
Today our new engraver, Ben Coulter, started working on actual production pieces after an extensive practice period. He said he just 'got it'--it is a muscle memory thing. One has to have a high level of concentration and you also have to train your body to be relaxed while doing it--you are worried you might leave out a word! Engraving is something that can only be done in short spurts. It can be fun but you can't do it all day. So when Ben is not engraving he is helping out in other areas in the studio. Congrats to our Ben as he sets out on engraving his first real pieces!!
These were some of the very first pieces I made in the late 80's. I found a secret bead store in North Beach called Yone . The owner was an eccentric and artistic soul who had wonderful objet d'art in his window along with a Ruth Asawa sculpture.
I was wearing a pair of these earrings when I went into the very first store I ever sold to, Teliao, on Brady Street. It was next to Bell'ochio where I bought hand dyed ribbons and vintage millinery supplies. The materials inspired me to make these miniature assemblages...not sure what to call them...but the are HUGE. They sold for $80 a pair at retail and each one took a zillion hours to make.
this is a ring from the new collection.
While drawing this collection, I surrounded myself every morning with flowering dogwood and cherry blossoms and was deeply inspired by the turn of the century works of Faberge and Lalique so full of poetry and astonishing detail. I realized that movement was inherent to the butterfly and that the pieces, like a lot of Faberge's work, had to have a magical secret to them-- in my own early pieces I made pieces with mystery such as an anatomical heart ring with a hidden door, a 'Travel Book' that opened to expose a tiny keyhole with a picture inside. This new collection goes back stylistically to my earliest creations in that they are all about the power of the secret.
I think of these pieces as small meditations to be worn together or next to each other. Making the Wedding Dress and Flower Girl necklaces, I thought of the dense silver and gold charm bracelets worn by my mother and grandmother that I played with as a child. Each pendant contains a private meaning, a poem that carries a potency that helps tell the unique narrative of the person who wears it.…. I am so proud of every single piece—they are magic--- and am so happy to present them at this milestone in my life as a designer.
While working on this collection I did many drawings of flowering quince, cherry and dogwood that I had all around in my studio. Quince was the perfect flower in which to hide a poem.
I had thought a lot about how Faberge hid poetic secrets inside his eggs and I felt challenged to make something in this spirit. Each of the 4 outside petals I carved individually from wax . On the sterling version the inside petal is gold and contains the verse from Rumi translated by Coleman Barks.
I carved this small piece of moss from a piece of wax and it is articulated on the back as well as the front. It took days and a lot of concentration and many drawing studies. Juxtaposed against the detail, it has a small clean oval where the engraving sits that quiver when worn. These are my favorite earrings to date.
I think of this ring as a small sculpture. It was a free form experiment and it looked very funky in the wax. We cast it as an afterthought just to see how it would turn out and it became an instant favorite in the studio immediately inspiring the larger Kothari ring and the babies, Katja and Teja. Gold plates are laminated to the ends where the poetry sits and I used rose gold on the 18k version. I think it would make an unusual and distinctive choice for a his and hers set paired with the Kothari.
many of the charms on my mother's bracelet move, like this circus monkey.
When I was little I played with my mom's charm bracelet all the time. It was in the scale I loved! The fact that the charms moved, opened and jingle-jangled when worn just made it as fascinating as the story it was telling charm by charm. It was as large as my head, or at least it seemed. Mom just let me play with it agian for this photo...and I have secretely been wearing it a bit...I am having a big love affair with charms right now as a result.
This was my grandmother's gold charm bracelet from the 60's. Each on has a date on the back.
When I first started making jewelry I discovered early on that I could engrave very minute words into metal and that a poem worn against the skin was very intimate. It was a cool secret that I had an entire Rilke poem hiding against my wrist. Quirky and idiosyncratic it was like nothing I had ever seen before. I started making one of a kind book pendants that had details, like keyholes with photographs smaller than a grain of rice, and sometimes the odd tiny sea horse under glass.
