Thoughts on the future of my trade

Jewelry Discussion
21

hans -

most peope running these machines don't have a clue how to make
real jewelry. Creating something with the help of a computer
doesn't make you a goldsmith

very good! for years i have sneered at the people who buy their
settings from someone else, set it with a stone cut by someone else,
and ‘oh, my gawd, i’m a jewelry designer!’

i know my stand on cad cam will offend some but here goes: if you
cannot pick up a .03 mm pencil, put it onto tracing vellum, work
with it until you have a recognizably different and workable design,
then go to your work bench, get out the sheets of metal, cut out the
basic shapes for your design, grab your torch and fabricate that
design, either find a stone you’ve already cut or one you like, and
put all of that together, then what are you - a parts manager?
perhaps lacking the artistic ability to transcribe anything on your
own is nature’s way of telling you to find other work.

frankly, when i see a picture in one of the trade magazines with a
caption: ‘a design by ms lotta hooey using a carving by herr it’sa
living [and cast by hoonoes]’, some where there must be a little old
lady or school kid who, given the chance, could also have matched up
those pieces.

while on the trade mags, here’s another bolt i wish to throw at
lapidary journal, art jewelry, adornment and the rest: please don’t
keep running the same old shots of the same old jewelry made by the
same old already established people. you should live up to your
professed, but not produced, aim of introducing new artists with new
talent, new ideas, new designs - new faces. no wonder you are all
turning out such skimpy little publications.

will i apologize for being so acerbic? nah, i am tired of jewelry
hackers who can’t stand on their own ability so they utilize a lot of
crutches. (a ‘jewelry hacker’ is anyone who sneaks into someone
else’s ideas/designs instead of coming up with their own.)

one day there will be a classified ad: “can’t draw/sketch, hard
solder, cut metal, cut and polish stones, carve, fabricate, cast from
your designs? haven’t got a bit of taste, need a pc to function? CALL
US TODAY for a career in jewelry design!”

ive

who has not had any pictures of her work rejected by any trade
publication - who hasn’t even sent any.

who also knows that those who will get the most ticked off at her
views will be those who best fit her descriptions.

22

Can’t wait to see the responses to this post, but being at it for
more than 33 years there is a lot here I agree with. A lot I have
said (although not on this forum) and a lot left unsaid ( that is a
soap box I don’t want to get on and a can of worms I do not wish to
open). Nicely put Ive.

Frank Goss

23

It is so funny that some folks, and you are one, are so proud of
your stance of ‘divide and slander’.

Who cares who makes what, as long as the finished product is
beautiful? What good does all of the bitterness you are slinging
around about people you don’t even know do to make you feel good
about yourself? Don’t be so afraid.

I am not meaning to come down on you personally, I don’t know you,
you are probably a very nice and interesting person. But our society
is getting way too divisive. We need to look to where we are all
together on something. I would hope that all metal smith’s be they
’artists’ or whatever could at least have the courtesy and respect
for everyone who is trying to make some sense out of their trade. The
world is big enough for everyone. Look for the middle path. .

Thanks, Dennis

24

I agree with Michael David Sturlin that fine handcrafting will not
go into oblivion as technology evolves. The legions of historians,
revivalists and re-enactors (medieval, Civil War, renaissance,
frontier, etc.) are an indication of our need to maintain contact
with the ways of the past. Collectors and museums are guardians of
objects of great beauty, culture and technology. I also like to think
that each generation will have its champions, people like Jean Stark,
Valentin Yotkov, Janet Berg and Oppi Untracht, who will research,
rediscover, record and share techniques and skills that may have
fallen by the wayside.

One of my goals next year is to spend time to learn Matrix. The main
issue will be finding the time. While I love benchwork and don’t have
enough time to do as much of it as I would like, I recognize that
CAD/CAM used in conjunction with my other skills will open up whole
new areas of work. Just working with a laser over the past few years
has already changed the way I design items for production.

Truthfully, CAD/CAM will displace some people in the industry, but I
firmly believe that to do good CAD jewelry work, a background in
goldsmithing is a must. Of course, I’m not talking about designing
channel rings for different stone sizes, but about full-on, complex
jewelry designing. I have seen work done by accomplished CAD people
with different goldsmithing and production backgrounds. The people
with the excellent goldsmithing skills outdesigned the people with
lesser metalsmithing backgrounds by a significant margin. They
understand ease of assembly, stonesetting requirements, metals
weights and guages, traditional design protocols for classical
jewelry work and finishing techniques. The others might attempt to
understand through observation of jewelry, by copying, etc., but
there tends to be a discernible lack of grace or some intangible that
exposes that they don’t quite understand how metal should work or
look.

We all have different choices to make when it comes to allocating
time and resources. We all have to make personal choices when it
comes to identifying what is the most fulfilling way to do something.
I love both the satisfaction and “romance” of making things by hand,
but I also acknowledge my technofreak side that loves efficiency,
tools, technology, science, engineering, etc. It will be a balancing
act, of that I am certain.

Bottomline, there will always be room for the handcrafted,
traditional ways. I try to give back by teaching and sharing
but I have also observed that many people want instant
gratification. They are unwilling to invest in the time, effort and
financial sacrifice to develop their craft. They want to “cut to the
chase” and get all the answers. They don’t want to practice. Perhaps
that is why the apprenticeship system has not flourished in the
United States and is languishing in other countries. I used to wonder
why some people were so unwilling to share their knowledge. I have
since found that some are insecure and don’t want to aid “the
competition”. Others simply don’t have the time and it is a sacrifice
or gift of time to teach someone else unless it is done for hire.
Even then, there is an opportunity cost to the teacher. But perhaps
the biggest reason more sharing/teaching isn’t done is because these
people, who have invested enormous amounts of time, energy and
intellectual as well as emotional effort in acquiring their knowledge
and skill don’t see the same dedication and love for the craft in
others. It seems to come down to a sort of “don’t want to throw
pearls among swine” mentality. It would be interesting to hear what
others have to say about this. I’m sure that many of you have
encountered a young person who wails about not having the money to
study or buy tools, but will go out nightclubbing or buy an iPod
instead of invest in handtools.

Donna Shimazu

25 
Accordingly, jewelry is generally considered to be a somewhat
female practice which is primarily directed at other females. (
Males do NOT lust after females with better jewelry....they lust
after what it is hung on and they especially lust after the bod
that is stripped clean of jewelry.....how is that for irony ? )

You forget, Ron, that males value the display of wealth. The jewelry
worn by a female may not be what attracts the male, but it may be
just as important to him as his snazzy new car (well, almost :-).
From earliest times to the present, jewelry has been as much a status
symbol or indication of rank as an aesthetic statement – and gender
matters very little in that regard.

Beth

26

Ok, beg to differ with the both of yous…

Are we not magnetically drawn to the twinkle of magic lighting up
the face of purity and truth, the warmth surrounding the wrist, the
seductive special metallic amulet resting in the pulsating hollow of
the collar-bone?? What about that supremely sexy index-finger ring,
or the completely irresistible anklet draped so casually over the
tanned foot?? Let’s forget about bods, quality and value for a
moment-- a beautiful woman/person can wear a candy bracelet and
still look cool. Jewelry is about magic, the twinkle in the eye, the
pulsating spots on the body that magnetically draw us, the scent of
pheromones on a lost earring-- fantasy, beauty, myth, legend, the
beautiful hands and fingers of a vibrant female, the masculine sent
of your man’s chest where that tough silver pendant rests, the
delicate orbs of pearls surrounding the brilliant face of the woman
you love-- forget me not what jewelry is about, but definitely
forget about value and bods-- jewelry is about magic-- The value of
precious materials is in their magic, not their scrap-value, value
is ascribed to the rarity of true beauty, not vice versa.

live your dreams.
J.

27

James,

First and foremost, you have earned all the positive comments seen
here within via this and other threads.

Before Orchid, there was very little sharing of “trade secrets.” My
years on Orchid has given me a great sense of the wonderful people
among us. that will continue, cad/cam or not!

There will always be a back and forth here based on whether one
views a half full or half empty glass. Doubt that will ever change.

In my lifetime, and I was a depression baby, in times great and
poor, people have always driven either a Ford, or a Cadillac, Chevy
or Continental, Volkswagon or Mercedes.

My mother would not allow me to buy a strand of Pearls at Woolworth,
she taught me to wait and save. At 16 I got a strand of graduated
cultured Pearls, care to venture what they are worth now?

Fine hand crafted jewelry will always find a buyer. Not all Chinese
made jewelry is mass produced junk. I wear a carved jade bangle,
hand carved. There are many fine craftspersons in most third world
countries. We do not gain stature by demeaning generalizations.

Will cad/cam really impact the fine craftspersons among us, I doubt
that. Are all of us exquisite craftspersons, no, not at all.
Although many think they are.

Ive, I loved what you wore at Tucson, Beth, Michael, I personally
know your exquisite work, I more than appreciate it.

Why all this gloom and doom?
Terrie

28

To the woman who wrote a very angry post (about everyone who isn’t
doing it right) in response to Mr. Millers post.

First, to establish my creds with you; I draw, fabricate, enamel and
only do one-off pieces; and have for almost 40 years.

About your deeply angry feelings. The ONLY productive thing you can
do with all that seething negative energy is to focus it back into
your own work…use it to drive yourself to express what YOU believe
and what you think is of value. Two really good things can result.

  1. All that adrenaline can produce some great breakthroughs for you
    and

  2. You’ll probably find that in the process of expressing yourself
    and creating work that you love your anger will have been lost along
    the way ( at first just for short periods of time). Creativity is
    absorbing and creating is a balm to the spirit and damn exciting!

Life as an artist is a process…few get through unscathed by
feelings of both inadequacy and under- appreciation. What matters is
what YOU are doing. Forget the rest of that stuff…it’s just a
distraction. Artists and artisans have always had to deal with the
success of those they felt had less talent/integrity (sometimes
true, sometimes not), of not getting a chance because the big guys
get all the press (papyrus).

After a while, even you will get tired of your own bitterness;
hopefully before those around you do so. Let it go and focus on what
you’re going to do. Strive to be worthy of your own respect.

Oh, I guess there is one other thing you could do with all your
anger if you stick with it over the long haul, you could always put
it to good use as an art critic.

Go to your studio and make stuff. Marianne Hunter
Ps…and yes, Mr. Miller is just wonderful

29

Sorry but need to weigh in on this:

1: Cad/Cam, as it’s being used and marketed, is geared to CASTINGS.
Casting is good, but not the only, nor prime way to make jewelry,
any more than you can make snowflakes by filling up an ice-cube
tray.

2: Jewelry, until now, represented the last, final vanguard of
hand-eye. This era has seen the final dissolve of the great
tradition of hand-eye in craft, once gone it cannot be brought back,
not as it was. You will find, once the novelty blows over, and
practically everybody can make perfectly calibrated pave settings on
some rapid-prototypable shape, that old African Dowry money
hand-forged from hand-mined iron will be the rage.

3: Don’t sweat this, guys, use the tools, don’t let them use you.
Technology does not define design nor concept. Do not allow
technique in any form to overwhelm your creative impulse-- there is
nothing more boring than technical brilliance with no Corazon.

4: Find your voice, alone in your shop, find what preaches to you
about the forms and the materials, suggest relating to it with your
body (I’,E, hands and eyes) before trying to model it in CAD and
prototype it by remote. Leave that for people who make electric
toothbrushes and ultra-lightweight bicycle wheels.

5: Really, if you were walking through the Met, and saw some Viking
breast-plate hand-hammered and chased next to some ridiculously
brilliant machine-carved wax model, what would you choose???

6: You simply can’t reproduce the moves of real metal in carving
wax, at all, never could. Carved wax models are already a farce. But
MACHINE-carved waxes? Pure roboticism. You’re so far removed at that
point from the final materials of your product, you’ve lost track.

7: Remember: These things are being WORN-- people (especially women)
have a very keen sense for integrity, whether they want to live
surrounded by molded/manufactured products or not. Trust that they
will feel the grain of your forged metal-- even if you make a mold
of it. Modeling in wax is a conceptual practice-- jewelry by
definition and immense tradition, is utterly and unequivocally
NON-CONCEPTUAL, it’s physical and emotional. If you think its done in
the brain and can be conceived on a screen and people will feel it,
you’re just wrong (but don’t take my word for it, go ahead and buy a
3-d ‘printer’ and 10k of CAD CAM stuff, and spend a few years finding
out for yourself). Hate to call the shots here-- CAD is great for
mass-produced, engineered parts used in industry, and has been a
great boon to architechture as well as the production of high-tech
composite fasteners, but has very little relevance to jewelry.
Technical progress often does not create a better product, just makes
us all fat and lazy,and corrupts our vision. Draw/walk the line here,
and use CAD as a tool, not a revolution.

J.

30

I walked into this conversation late but I just can’t help myself
but to respond.

First off I think until the second half of the 20th cent. the
Jewelry business was dominated by men not women and although I am
sure many men buyers buy Jewelry for a lady to impress her or others
I think far more buy Jewelry as a symbol of their love and devotion.

As for lusting after the bod that is stripped clean of Jewelry, I
don’t know about others but to me there is nothing more beautiful
than an attractive woman with nothing more then her Jewels.

Greg DeMark
greg@demarkjewelry
www.demarkjewelry.com

31 
You forget, Ron, that males value the display of wealth. The
jewelry worn by a female may not be what attracts the male, but it
may be just as important to him as his snazzy new car (well, almost
:-).

Generalization about either sex or gender tends to be stereotyping
and is arguably unhelpful.

I am a male. I don’t fit these stereotypes. Ostentatious displays of
wealth send me a message of vulgarity and superficiality. I don’t
drive a new car, and the guy who HAS to have one, IMO, is likely
compensating for shortcomings elsewhere in his life.

Smart women are a turn-on for me. Maybe it is a trait embedded deep
in the genes, an innate desire to select a smart mate so that our
offspring are never seen on the Jerry Springer show. Maybe it is just
an awareness that over the years we will spend more time conversing
than coupling. A woman whose adornment is smart, artistic and
original is a positive visual sign. Bonus points for defying
convention and pulling it off. Ostentatious, bourgeoise and boring
are major turn-offs for me.

Lee

32 
The consumer has changed and is no longer as willing to pay for
handcrafted items!

respectfully, Annabel, I would like to disagree with your above
comment. Historically jewellery has always been a luxury item, and
customers throughout through the ages have always wanted the lowest
price. Also, as I’m sure James Miller would attest, there are still
plenty of people that do appreciate quality. If the people you have
asked in your informal survey are not willing to pay what you think
of as reasonable for your work, then sell to different people! enjoy
your work,

Christine Pyman in Sth Aust

33

Firstly I would like to thank all who sent me their comments
regarding my work. I agree with a lot of the comments written about
my original posting, I am sure that if I was just starting out in the
trade I would adopt many of the new techniques available, but I also
think that I would not have developed my own style of work and
trademark pieces, such as my use of flora and fauna in many of my
creations. I think of a simple bunch of flowers, if a customer asks
me to make one in precious metals, I say “no problem”, just tell me
what your favourite flowers are and I will copy them from nature ( or
a book). I went to a symposium on new machinery recently, out of
curiosity, I was talking to a salesman trying to sell me a CNC
machine that would do all of my piercing for me. I was told that this
machine would cut to within.003" of a design, it was made by a German
company called Schmalz, and it would only cost me $90,000. I gave an
example of what I would want to pierce, which was a pair of easter
egg shells with an uneven floral pattern, I showed him a photo of one
of my finished eggs ( the Flax Egg ) and asked him to explain the
process. I was told that this machine could cut the top half of the
egg in about three hours and the bottom section in four hours, which
I thought was marvelous as the original took me 32 hours to draw,
engrave and pierce, but then the salesman told me that the time to
write the program that instructs the machine where to cut would take
about 50 hours to prepare, this would equate to 57 hours ( plus the
cost of buying and running the machine). Great if I was making a
dozen identical eggs, but no good for just the one!

peace and good health to you all
James Miller

34

I’m curious, what institutions are there in the USA that are
designed to perpetuate and keep the craft ‘alive’?

The only reason I ask is because it seems like everything in the USA
is going away, the same problem exists in the faceting area.

Craig
www.creativecutgems.com

35

I agree. I always thought jewelry was meant to draw attention to
where the person wanted you to look. Low hanging pendants with very
sparkly stones obviously draw attention to the cleavage area, higher
pendants to the hollow of the neck, etc. Of course it’s probably all
just my opinion.

Craig
www.creativecutgems.com

36

I agree with you Christine. Part of the problem I think is that
consumers are no longer sure (other than obvious indications like
price) what is quality jewelry and what isn’t. I liken this to the
zircon / cubic zirconia confusion that started (I think) in the 70’s.
To this day many many people (even those who should know better)
think Zircons are Cubic Zirconia.

I still think it all comes back to education as many here have
said.

Craig
www.creativecutgems.com

37

A quick comment on CAD vs. hand done. You are limited by the
computer program and the program writers as to what it can do. You
are unlimited by your imagination and your dexterity as to what you
can do. My husband draws has in his career lifetime drawn many house
designs and plans. He hires people who do CAD drawings for the same
thing. He always says it’s easier to draw a curved line on paper with
a pencil than it is to do the same thing with a computer.

Just a thought.

Veronica

38 
At 16 I got a strand of graduated cultured Pearls, care to venture
what they are worth now?

Ahh…probably not much. Pearls age with time and generally become
less valuable, not more valuable.

Daniel R. Spirer, G.G.
Daniel R. Spirer Jewelers, LLC
1780 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02140

39

I would buy your eggshells long before I would even look at a
machine-prototyped one, let alone the machine! I admire your courage,
these wax-milling plotters are downright scary-- but then I nearly
jumped out of my skin when I saw my brother the engineer, after
years of grueling training at the drafting board, printing out
plotted drawings 15 years ago-- the way it drew numbers with little
pens gave me the creeps…

To think the craft of masonry is all but dead, and the great
tradition of timber-framing had to be resuscitated from old fallen
barns-- (only by now they even have CAM machines that cut whole
house-frames with all the mortise and tenon joinery, all from a
CADfile-- to see something truly scary Google Hundegger).

You are in a fabulous position unattainable by any keyboard
operator. There will be a retrospective at the Tate when the hoards
realize the folly of JewelCAD and crave the great traditions of
metalwork, which until now we have not ventured away from since the
advent of the Bronze Age.

Strange times indeed.

J.

40

james -

it was made by a German company called Schmalz, and it would only
cost me $90,000

$90,000.00!! that’s an awful lot of money for a machine made by a
company calling itself “chicken fat” (or “greasy, melted fat”) - a
term that’s a yiddish ‘loanword’ filtered through american english
slang.

umm, don’t think i’d pay much for anything made by a company not
inspired enough to a name change for a better professional image.

laugh people - life is short and the after is endless.

ive
who feels that james could hire someone to do piercing a fraction of
that price.