Jeweler’s workbench and Silversmith Studio in Santa Cruz, Bay Area California.
Nowadays, most people interested in jewelry making enroll in a class at the local community college. I know that in a classroom setting, you typically have the opportunity to get exposed to a variety of different jewelry making techniques, which might be good for getting an idea of what you might like to pursue further. However, I feel that unless you get the opportunity to do a particular process over and over again (such as sawing) you will likely never get enough experience at it to ever get fast and proficient at it. Often you have one project you are assigned to complete in a class and you get to do each process once if you don’t destroy it in the making. haha.
The fabulous thing about apprenticeship with and artist whose work you KNOW YOU LOVE and would like to emulate in some way, is that you are getting repetition and hand-on experience with one-on-one training and overseeing with a master who is most definitely invested in you doing it right and doing it well. And furthermore, because a particular technique will often determine the general look, feel, and recognizability of body of work, you get to learn and understand specifically what that artist does to create the look that they are known for. That’s priceless.
Silversmith Apprenticeship
When people ask me “How did you learn silversmithing?”, I feel a sense of pride in remembering what an honor and privilege it was to work closely and intensely for 3 years with a master of his unique artistic genre; Spiritual Silversmithing. StarSparks, as he was known back then and for much of his career, was a maker of medicine objects, personal talismans, and mystical jewelry. His humor, creativity and intelligence was like nothing I had encountered and shared remarkable parallels in our interests, which were esoteric and relatively obscure, such as Mayan Calendar Mathmatics.
When we met again in Colorado, I was primed in my early 20’s for learning an artistic trade that I could make a career with. I already loved jewelry, and was stunned by the beauty and spiritual power of a necklace he showed me upon on of our early encounters in the mountains that summer of ’96. I was thinking: this is the kind of stuff Ive always fantasized about but never had seen before…
Sensing my understanding of his work and my enthusiasm, he offered me an apprenticeship. We spent the next month or 2 deciding on the perfect location to settle down and het to work as we were both traveling at the time. We set up shop and he began to teach me many of the processes, and I basically worked and learned for free. We marketed the pieces as a team from then on, and I got a full understanding of what the business, or at least HIS business was all about. The challenges, the many, many processes, and dove in fully to production pace…probably making a lot of mistakes along the way I was unaware of that might have bugged him more than a little. I feel grateful everyday for the gift of his knowledge, his lineage, and the patience he had with me all those years.
The tools, technique and specific processes of any art form creates a look
