Some of the photos I have of my older pieces - images that in particular have proved so well liked by the people who buy my work - this is after all how I make my living - that I feel that I want to continue with them.
I used to make only one painting per idea - I am about to increase that to two - one for earrings and one for pendants and brooches. I need more pendants to send with orders to galleries to make their displays even though it is always earrings that seem to out sell everything. Personally I prefer brooches but I know that I am in a minority. That is how I began - making literally a fragment of a painting to wear.
No two pieces of jewellery ever have an identical image as I build up many layers and by doing so leave traces only that emerge or are softened into the background again and again as I add more colours or more shades and hues of one colour. It is a delicate and prolonged process - often 30 layers on a painting + silver, copper and gold leaf - or foils - they work very differently.
This brooch was an interpretation of a blend of impressions - the shifting turquoises of the sea - I am in Capri - and the horizon, a memory of a ceramic bowl of snowdrops from my childhood that evoke different things to different people - as in the universal power of abstract impressionism.
For me I see the silver columns of ancient Roman pillars catching sunlight fleetingly or perhaps moonlight in the present moment and their imprint as soft shadows from the past.
Immediately my mind takes off into a world of imagination. The snowdrops are no longer flowers, they are travellers by sea - Phoenician traders, refugees...
It is also an air of Japanese prints - anyway I love it and I will do a series of re-creations from the past and see where that takes me.
Also some larger wall pieces.
