Architectural Inspiration

 A building or a brooch in silver?

Modern architecture has an amazing affinity with jewellery despite the great difference in scale,  Frank Gehry designs both art forms successfully. Not that I am comparing myself to Frank Gehry but I originally studied architecture at University College London and now many years later I design and make jewellery. Maybe it is something about the sculptural qualities of both that transcend the difference of purpose.

Lately I have become more inspired by architectural forms, feeling perhaps that I should broaden my inspirational source pool. I have been scouring the internet for pictures of architectural forms, collecting pictures on Pinterest for later perusal. On a day in London yesterday I looked around me as I walked the streets at the buildings that go up constantly. Many seem to be a straighforward box, but as I walked past the new Tottenham Court Road tube station I saw it as a beautiful curving brooch with grid pattern in silver.

I am sure I won't abandon my love of natural forms altogether but it feels refreshing to have a new favourite subject for a while!

Sublime Blue

Bluebells at Dusk

Last wednesday evening I went walking with friends in some woodland down in East Sussex. The bluebells have been better than usual this year, prolific and lasting for weeks and we walked among them as the sun was gradually sinking. The sublime blue hovers like a misty haze just above the ground and as the dusk deepens it turns slowly from blue to purple. We hoped to see badgers or foxes but despite staying quiet until it was dark all we saw was a tawny owl.

Afterwards we walked back through the woods to our hosts who own and manage the woodland and who keep 25 peacocks around their house including one pure white one. Their cries had been piercing the night since we arrived. Several of the peacocks were displaying their tail feathers fully and engaging in some courtship behaviour, but I did not see any glimmer of interest from the peahens, they were playing hard to get. We were served Victoria sponge made with peacock eggs.

It is not only the bluebells that have been wonderful this year but also the hollows carpeted with the white starry flowers of wild garlic and the boggy woodland studded with magenta orchids, the creamy blackthorn blossom in the hedgerows and the pale yellow primroses on the stream banks. I look forward to the wild anemones that come next.

Finding Details

Whenever I visit somewhere new I, of course, take my camera and what I love photographing are architectural details, especially metalwork. I have a series of pictures down the sidebar of this blog. A part of me would love to work in a big scale, I actually took a short welding workshop long ago, but my business is jewellery and for now that is what I am immersed in.

I have just returned from a quick trip to the city of Milwaukee, a place full of very interesting ornate architecture, much built by the origianl immigrants from Germany. These doors were on a theatre we passed walking around the historic Third Ward. I think they are made of copper. As my husband and our friends walked on I just had to stop and get up close to the doors. The copper had a wavy pattern embossed in the metal and I love the patchy verdigris and the large rivet heads!

Happy photographing!

Buttons

Enamel and silver buttons

A little taste of what I have been working on lately - some functional silver and enamel buttons. Most of them are constructed with both fine and sterling silver. I use the fine silver if possible for the enamelled parts and then the sterling for strength of construction. This palette of enamel colours always seems to fire easily and without problems, and I love these shades.

Ever since I was about eleven years old and picked up an old tin of buttons at a jumble sale I have always had a liking for these functional but pretty things. After I learned that buttons were originally purely for decoration, essentially sewn on brooches - buttonholes weren't invented until later - I had a resurgence of interest in them and decided to make some of my own.

Maybe it is because I am working in enamel a lot now, but I keep finding more things to do with enamelling - organisations, jewellers, museums, exhibitions and so on. I just joined Grains of Glass - have a look at their site, there is link to it on my side bar. Perhaps we are at the start of a new blossoming in the art of enamelling? I hope so, Happy Spring!

Magnolia

However much I think I am moving into some other field of inspiration the world of plants and flowers yanks me back with some exquisite piece of perfection from nature. Today we had one of the first sunny and warm days of spring and my star magnolia bush is blooming - eight glorious confections of waxy white petals around a cone of pale green gold stamens.

I realise that thousands of people live in places where magnolias thrive and grow into huge trees and are covered in blooms. They are not my magnolia. My magnolia is fifteen years old and has attained the great height of five feet. For its first five years it actually got smaller every year due to breakage from snow. Then I had the bright idea of fertilizing it in the spring and summer and it actually grew big enough that it didn't collapse under the four feet of snow on top of it.

At the age of twelve my magnolia decided to bloom for the first time - you can imagine the excitement over the single flower. The following year it came up with three blooms. Last year I inwardly screamed as a landscaper we had contracted to lay a stone patio dropped a wheelbarrow load of stone right on the bush!

So now, with its eight flowers and its sturdy five foot limbs I think I can relax and enjoy it. As I walk by its intense fragrance wafts around and draws me to study the flowers again and to check what little visitors are feasting on the nectar. I would love to use the feeling I get from admiring the blooms and put it into my work. When something in nature is this perfect any artificial form of it, however abstract seems redundant.