Art New, of sorts. | Issue #31

It’s that time again!

That time where I sit down and write a flurry of text in an attempt to convey my current train of thought.

There seems to be a pattern developing with my writing where I put it all off until the day I have scheduled to send out content to the world via my newsletter and my website.  

There are two things that crossed my mind recently, one is educational, the other is a little bit about how my ideas come to me.

First off, I want to give a little bit of a primer on what jewelry findings are.  So let’s get started.

Jewelry Findings

As I was poking around several handmade jewelry websites last week looking for some inspiration to write about, I came across something that hadn’t really struck me as odd before.  It’s something I accepted as part of my studio art background because it’s industry jargon and I never really became overly curious about it until last week:

Findings

For some reason, I suddenly realized that the term seemed a little strange to me.  I found myself wondering how a part of a piece of jewelry that has a function ended up being called a finding.  I mean, it seemed odd to me that so many parts of a piece of jewelry are called findings.

As I began to search for information on the internet, it made a lot more sense to me.

First off, I consulted Merriam-Webster online dictionary to see what the official definition of a find is:

The secondary definition of finding there is:

2 findings plural : small tools and supplies used by an artisan (such as a dressmaker, jeweler, or shoemaker)

Okay, great, but what exactly are findings?  Jewelry findings encompass many things.  To name a few findings include: 

• Jump rings
• Earring Findings (for example: ear wires)
• Clasps
• Chain and necklace ends (like the wire wrapping of a leather necklace)
• Split rings
• Safety chains

That’s just to name a few and doesn’t encompass all of the sub categories.  

But why the word finding?  I mean is it because they join things together or is there some other reason that they are all considered findings?

I decided to look up the etymology of the word finding:

1. 1300, "act of discovering" (by chance or after searching; also an instance of this); verbal noun from find (v.).

I still didn’t understand what that had to do with these very functional parts of jewelry, so I decided to utilize the internet some more by doing a general search to see what I could find.

It didn’t take very long to find several articles and blog posts out there with an explanation.

It turns out, surprise surprise, that precious metals have always been expensive and jewelers would make most, if not all, of these important parts from scraps of metal found around their shops and studios.  Hence they were made from “the findings.”

Huh, I never knew.  It makes complete sense to me now, and it is actually something I often find myself doing.  It just never occurred to me that I was making a finding.

Creativity and Ideas

I have a long history of wondering if I am actually creative.  Some people think I am.  I often question it, though maybe that’s the nature of some of the self-doubt so many of us seem to encounter throughout life.

Whenever I think about where my creativity comes from, I almost immediately begin unearthing high school memories of English class where I had an amazing teacher who insisted that we all learn about Greek mythology. 

Greek mythology?

Yep.

So many of my ideas seem to come to me out of thin air.  It’s because of this that I think of the Muses found in Greek mythology.  They were the goddesses of inspiration for literature, the sciences, and the arts.

Sometimes ideas seem to come to me out of nowhere, more often than not, I find inspiration in other art and other peoples’ creations and then I take those ideas and apply them to something new or maybe combine several ideas into something new.  

Take for example this week’s main image, the celtic knot inspired art that was created by an AI art app I used called Starry AI.  It was created from a text prompt I wrote in hopes of finding new inspiration on some human emotional concepts that I wanted to portray using silver.  I had been feeling really stuck a few days ago, so I began playing around with my AI app in hopes of getting unstuck.

I do want to make a note here and say that, I don’t ever pass off AI art as my own.  What I do do is take the AI art that looks interesting and do my best to build upon it in ways that make sense for the media I work with: silver

This week’s image may not be used for any future designs, however, I do like some of the shapes in the art and it reminds me that I can play around with shapes more.

Other ideas come from the natural world.  I enjoy finding odds and ends in the world that are the creation of nature.  Oddly shaped stones that I find appealing, or the cone scales of a pine cone.  Sometimes I don’t really do anything other than do a sand casting of the found objects.  Other times I use their shape to create something that mimics nature, like the outline of a fish, or cut out shapes that resemble maple leaves and then stamp the veins so that the end result evokes the idea of a maple leaf.

The important things that I’m trying to convey here are:

• Most of my creativity is really just adding and subtracting ideas in ways that look appealing to me.
• Probably 80% of my ideas come to me randomly
• Most of the time my ideas come when I’m doing something completely unrelated to making jewelry.  Such as, in the shower or going for a run.

So next time you find yourself in a creative mode and get stuck, try doing something else, spend time looking out into the world for inspiration.  Take that nap.  Take that relaxing shower.  Go for a run.  Sit back and see what happens.

Until next time,

Justin