Art New, of sorts. | Issue #27

Forest Path
Photo by Zoltan Tasi : unsplash.com/@zoltantasi

I wish everyone a happy and safe July Fourth holiday!

Driving home tonight, I suddenly felt the desire to pontificate on how I connect my childhood experience of being read the Hobbit (and all or part of the Lord of the Rings) in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a child to my relationship with silver and design in general. So this week I’m going to write about it a little.

What I remember about the Hobbit

As a small child

Before I was able to read on my own, my father read me The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. I don’t actually recall how old I was. It was in the late 1970s, so I couldn’t have been more than 8 years old. When I was 8, I would have been in second grade and was able to read by then, so it must have been when I was 5 or so. I vaguely remember wearing pajamas that had feet and I also recall sitting next to my father and sometimes sitting on his lap as he read to me. Occasionally, he would do voices for the characters.

I recall specific scenes. The trolls that capture the dwarves, for instance. When Thorin gives Bilbo a chainmail shirt of mithril, I remember the description of it as being of whitish color. For some reason that stuck with me. Maybe it was because it was forged by elves, or maybe it was because of all the other magical weapons the dwarves and elves made. In any case, I remember being entranced by the idea of mithril.

Grade School

In 6th grade, there was a kid named David. He played Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). I wanted to play, but didn’t know how. The game rekindled memories of my father reading The Hobbit to me and it wasn’t long before a couple of my friends, Spencer, and Shawn, began playing D&D and invited me to play with them. We spent hours playing that game.

As I’ve mentioned in some of my blog posts, my paternal grandparents were members of the Burlington Gem and Mineral Club. I spent summer days walking around the forest on some neighbor’s land. They mowed walking trails which also doubled as cross country skiing trails in the winter. There were several areas that were “good” and several that seemed “evil”. As I walked around I would often keep my eyes open for unusual rocks or interesting sticks that had fallen from trees. It was like being in The Hobbit on a strange and mysterious journey all of my own.

So it wasn’t really a stretch for my child’s imagination to connect all these things together. The Hobbit, magic rocks, D&D. It was a thread that wound through my young life.

High School

When I got to high school, I was more interested in girls than playing D&D with friends. I can’t say for sure, but I think most of my friends had stopped playing once we got to high school. There were other activities which seemed to eclipse playing fantasy games. Sports being one of them. As I wasn’t interested in sports, I was briefly involved in chorus. Though after the chorus teacher passed away, I stopped because I didn’t care for the new teacher that the school hired.

About the same time, I became more and more interested in crystals and minerals. I had started working in Burlington at the city’s youth center and I often visited a record store called Pure Pop or another store called The Peace & Justice center. I wasn’t very interested in the literature at the Peace & Justice store. They had baskets of polished stones though. Quartz, sodalite, aventurine, citrine (orange quartz crystals), amethyst, jade, jasper, bloodstone, hematite, to name a few.

I began reading about the mystical qualities of the stones and by the end of my second year in high school, I began carrying around various crystals to imbue their qualities upon myself. I’m not sure it worked, but I sure acted like it did. Many of my friends made fun of me.

The other thing that was happening was that I was researching and learning about runes. I had always wanted to learn how to write runes like J.R.R. Tolkien had in some of his books. By the time I was a junior in high school and working at a health food store, I had either been given books on runes by friends, or bought books on herbal medicine as well as a few divination books.

By the end of high school, I was learning more about the symbolism of runes. I even made a set of runes for divination in my high school ceramics class.

College

As a result of my interest in runes as well as eastern philosophy and religion (Taoism, Buddishm, Hinduism) I decided to take a comparative religion class in college.

I didn’t do very well. Mostly because I’m not a fast reader and the professor would assign 100 pages of reading at time (as did professors for at least two other classes I was in concurrently.)

It was still fun and I think I came away with a better understanding of the fact that Judaism, Christianity and Islam are not the only religions found in our world.

In fact, I think that it helped cement an idea that I have long held: We are a part of the universe, the earth, and each other.

This is important to me because I really feel that many many religions, both living and dead, attempt to connect us to the earth and the greater reality that we all perceive to exist in.

So when I began playing with silver in my fine metals classes, I also began to read more about runes again, as well as the northern European and Nordic pre-christian religions. I even incorporated chainmail and a runic bind rune into one of my final college pieces.

The other connection I made when I began working with sterling silver was that when you put it in jeweler's pickle (a mild chemical solution to remove oxidation) it appears to turn white.

Seeing sterling silver turn white as I began working with it immediately caused memories of Bilbo’s mithril chainmail to come into my head and I was hooked on working with silver at that point.

I hope this brief addendum to my prior writings helps shed some additional light on why I mostly work with sterling silver.

News of late

  • Working on a few new techniques to create more consistent charcoal castings that I can use a create sandings from
  • Still playing around with water casting, I need to find my old crucible, which is smaller than the one I have been using. It won’t take as much acetylene to melt sterling silver
  • My first batch of business cards showed up, and I have been handing them out when there appears to be interest
  • I handed off art to have a rubber stamp created
  • The engraving business I used to engrave my designs for bracelets is moving much further away, such that it will take a 90 minute round trip to drop off things and I’m a little bummed out by it.
  • Working on some ideas for simple jewelry that takes less time to create yet still follows my own sense of style

Until next time,
Justin

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