Differing viewpoints

Another jewelry artist in the National Transit Studios is Swan Daashur.  Swan is an amazing artist and she and I are as different as night and day.  I'm more traditional in my designs and her pieces are definitely art pieces.  We've shown our work together for that very reason.

A while back I was working with copper clay which I rolled onto a bent wire to create my design.  I had done this with bronze and created a necklace that I really like. The copper clay I was working with was a brand that is not my favorite, but since I had it......... might as well use it up.

Well.....this technique was being very difficult in copper.  Every single piece I made broke when I was sanding it.  The first plan was to trash it all, then I decided to try pasting the pieces together and see what happened.  As I progressed it looked like a bunch of bananas.  Still wasn't sure I liked it, but maybe it would work out so I fired it, polished it and added a patina.  Still not sure I liked it.

It laid around a few weeks before I found some beads that complimented it.  At first I was going to just use the beads, but felt that it needed more.  Hence the "run-over" beads in yesterday's post.  They fired with a nice earthy color, so no polishing here.  Since wire was used in the design, I decided to also add a wire element.  Saturday I played around with making some ying-yang wire connectors.

Swan stopped by on Saturday and I was telling her about this piece.  She flipped the focal piece over and said.... "You know me, I like the unusual.  I like the back better." (Swan calls it as she sees it!)  After she left I kept taking a look at the piece, flipping it back and forth from front to back.  You know...... I think I do too.