MINERALARTS: Iron and Thorn

I’m doing a series of yin-yang cats for a T-shirt.  The next step will be a larger “whole cats” drawing!

Other black and white art:  I finished sewing both pieces of this autumn outfit - the ankle-length jumper is Japanese cotton dobby cloth in charcoal printed with litte gray birds.  Buttons are made from a big catfish bone that I found in western Kentucky several years ago.  Underneath is basically a muslin nightgown with ruffles at the collar, sleeves, and hem - the long length looks better than a shirt.

Clouds from Mexico’s hurricane arrived yesterday evening, along with the faint smell of the ocean that we sometimes get with these September storms - it’s always a wonderful surprise in the desert.  This morning we awoke to a steady, gentle rain that continued for a couple of hours and left the air feeling cool and soft.  Green shoots are ripening into fruits and seedpods.  Young tree roots and branches are thickening, bark is forming, and growth slows as the equinox approaches.

Too hot and humid to paint or do much at the forge, so I made a drawing that I’ve been wanting to do for awhile:  yin yang cats and kittens.  This is the simplest of several variations that I sketched, and could be simplified even further.  Fits in a 3.5″ circle.

Here’s a view from my daily morning walk, a 4.5-mile loop along a dirt road and a rocky, sandy wash.  This area is especially rich in dense forests of very tall ocotillos, which are the intensely green sticks in the photo.

For the last two nights, the moon has been spectacular - a glowing copper crescent falling into blue-gray storm clouds, surrounded by streaking branches of blue-white lighting!  Energizing and life-giving, it is a call to work on what is really important, and to seek out and appreciate all that is living and growing now.  Put aside trivia and idle amusements, touch the living fire and work with it, draw its energy deep and store it.

Pomegranate of the Day:  Fire (yellow and orange ochre, and black manganese oxide).

This Moon I have continued to work on several large projects - the Xerophytic Ferns Guide now has photos of 21 species, so the webpage is more than half finished.  I wasted a couple of weeks on a sewing project that didn’t work out, so I put it away for awhile.  Unfinished drawings of pomegranates, cats, and plants are scattered on my desk.  In honor of the Perseid meteor shower, I forged A DOZEN small triangular bells with cone clappers and sewed them on my new shaman’s belt.  I’ll post a photo when it’s done, but for now I’m working on more cone bells- it’s not heavy enough yet

Here’s a series of cone bells in progress, showing the steps in forging them:  The blank (1) is a 1″ triangle hot-chiselled from 1/8″ thick mild steel.  The wide end is hammered flat (2) then hammered into a tube (3).  The narrow end is “drawn out” or hammered into a square-sided point (4).  The point is hammered round and the cone is flared (5) with pliers.  The point is filed smooth and curled into a loop, and the cone is given its final shape and quenched (6).  The gray firescale is removed with a wire brush, and any rough spots are ground and polished smooth (7).  The bright shiny cone is returned to the fire and quenched in peanut oil to give it a glossy black finish (8).

Unlike my curly cones, which are made from cut nails and have fairly precise, symmetrical shapes, this group is more freeform and each one will be a bit different.  The “traditional” iron cones found on Siberian shaman’s costumes and West African ritual staves usually have a larger, flattened loop and are not flared or curled.  It’s a simpler style consistent with cones shaped entirely by hammering, without the use of pliers.  But the basic method of construction is the same.

Here is Antheraea oculea, the Oculea Moth, that I found while photographing ferns.  It is closely related to the Polyphemus Moth of the eastern forest, but lacks the pink shading and the purple band on the hindwing, and has larger forewing eyespots.  The eyespots are little windows - they are bare of scales and you can see through them.  Some species of these giant silk moths have mirrors - eyespots covered in reflective silvery white scales - and some have both.

There is much to see through these windows now, in the wettest monsoon since 2000.  The rain brings colorful caterpillars, metallic jewelled Plusiotis scarabs, many kinds of mushrooms (some rarely seen in the desert), and summer wildflowers that only appear in years of heavy rain.  It is as if the winged windows themselves bring these wonders. 

In bedrock washes, the mirror-pools of standing water attract everyone, and this is the time of year that the jaguar walks north and looks for his reflection in these tinajas. 

The mirror-window is a recurring theme that seems to keep working its way into my art.  Some of my first pieces of iron jewelry were “mirror-window” pendants that held pieces of mica.  They reflected pearlescent light and a hint of color, but you could look through them and see another world.

ABOVE - Copper wire jewelry.  Triskele earrings with African iron beads (2007), wirewrap pendant with tumbled hematite (1992).

This summer I can celebrate 15 years of metalworking.  Not continuous work, but slowly evolving anyway.  In 1992 I began making jewelry from recycled copper.  No jigs or specialized tools, just ordinary jeweler’s pliers, coils of 14 and 16 gauge wire, and a handful of beads cut from old evaporative cooler tubing.  It was what I could afford, it was portable, and it seemed appropriate for the desert.  Recycled copper was cheap at the scrap yard, and copper ore surrounds us in the mountains.  I soon added inexpensive stones (including the turquoise “donuts” that I still love), leather cord, and silver earring wire.  I bought a forge and started blacksmithing in 1994, and got a torch and began working with silver in 1997.  Now, many pieces of jewelry later (some remembered and a lot forgotten), I have decorated my yard with blue-green stones - copper ore from half a dozen mountain ranges - and I still have days when all I want to do is curl up in a corner of the shop (sitting on the floor, of course) with a coil of copper wire and my battered pliers, and make spirals, triskeles, and chain links.  I also enjoy the challenge of hot-forged copper, when I hammer my favorite iron motifs out of the softer red metal.  The necklace below (finished today) is cold-hammered 16 gauge wire and hot-forged heavy 8, 6, and 4 gauge wire.  

Here’s a “copper ore” bag - green for malachite, purple for cuprite, light blue lining for turquoise, and dark blue embroidery for azurite.  Even has copper cord for drawstrings!

Today was “bloom day” for the endangered Pima Pineapple Cactus.  The plant pictured above is the largest of several that grow in the desert near my house (my cactus website has more photos).  All plants usually bloom on the same day, three to five days after the first significant monsoon rain.  This year, the past five days have been rainy enough to spread the bloom out over several days (they have to have sun at midday for the flowers to open fully), and about half the plants will bloom tomorrow.  The cactus bees - fuzzy gray and harmless - will be delighted.  I’ve been watching these cacti for seven years, and the bloom is a very precious (and nearly solitary) celebration:  The desert hushed and dreaming at midday in the soft, humid sunlight.  Thunder over the mountains, sprinkles of rain, the knobby green cacti scattered like jade carvings over the bare pinkish-orange soil…and the luminous, slightly fluorescent glow of the flowers, the yellow light pouring up out of the earth.

Another cactus discovery made today even more special - FIVE bouncing baby barrels in my yard!  These are Arizona barrels (also called compass barrel or fish hook barrel, Ferocactus wislizenii).  The two in the picture are about an inch in diameter and are probably a year old already, they were just shrunken and hidden in the gravel until the rain.  I love prowling the yard at this time of year, looking for new “volunteer” desert plants.  When we moved in, there were almost no plants here - all the previous owners had “zeroscaped” with weedkillers and thirty years of indifference.  Over the next few years, we added rocks and boulders, searched local nurseries for native plants, accepted gifts of agave and prickly pear from neighbors, and rejoiced with the appearance of each tiny wild yucca, ocotillo, or shrub.  I have planted several salvaged barrel cacti already, but the appearance of seedlings is a sign of true healing for this piece of land.  In this part of the desert, the Arizona barrel reaches its greatest size and abundance, and spectacular “barrel gardens” and dense ocotillo forest are a special feature of the Santa Rita Mountains bajada.  The cacti are typically one to four feet tall and up to a couple of feet in diameter, but a really ancient barrel (well over 100 years old) can be more than six feet tall.  Now that I know they’re here, I will enjoy caring for these new arrivals.

This pomegranate is a shattered copper vessel.  The little green balls (one is hollow) are the glassy phosphate spheres that form in the ashes of funeral pyres (in the Tibetan Book of the Dead they are called “jewel-like relics”).

Eventually, 28 pomegranates will form the series of daily cards for my moon oracle.  That way, every day will hold the promise of the the Ace of Disks.  Each day holds the the infinite creativity of the earth and the faithful yet ever-changing mysteries of the Moon.  This oracle will have sticks, stones, bones, turtle shells…and pomegranates.  Like the ancient shaman’s pebble oracle, it will be flexible, having a usable structure but not a rigid system.  For example, does the image above represent today’s First Quarter Moon?  If not, which day does it fit?  What if it wasn’t assigned a particular day - perhaps it depends on the time of year - and what if you pulled it at random as your daily card?  (Enjoy this game but don’t think too much about it right now.  Until all 28 images are done, you won’t really know how they “work” - and I won’t, either!)

This is one of several mysterious pictographs in a rockhouse near the Gila River.  The outer circle is pinkish-white clay or possibly chalk (caliche).  The black circle is actually dark purple and is probably magnetite sand.  The red circle is, of course, hematite (red ochre).  The green is malachite (copper ore).  Upon close examination, it appears that the center of the circle was originally black.  All the pigments could have been collected at the same place, and perhaps the picture means nothing more than that - a simple geologic diagram.  Perhaps it represents the earth, or a spring, or an eye, or mabye it denotes ownership.  Such a basic design, universal and intensely personal at the same time, can surely mean many things.  I offer it here as a cenote - a well or spring - for inspiration.

Tonight we had the real thing - a true Sonoran chubasco, or wild monsoon storm!  This one may indeed be the “magic rain” that brings out the sapos (spadefoot toads), makes several species of cacti bloom and wildflowers grow, and revives the ferns.  In the nearby hills, the washes are running (water pouring over granite outcrops, swirling around mesquite roots, and fanning the sand into new patterns).  Today was hot and sunny, well over 100.  At sunset, dark yellowish-gray clouds swirled over the mountains and a huge dust cloud roared off the bulldozed desert just west of here.  Then a blacker cloud arose and completely swallowed the sunset - lightning travelling ahead of the rain had ignited a grass fire.  Finally the rain arrived, blowing fiercely horizontal at first, later falling calm and steady.  (Somewhere tonight, someone will stumble into a wash and be lost in a torrent.  Somewhere tonight, lives are saved at the last minute - desert wanderers are huddled in a saguaro grove, hiding from the lightning, rain washing heat and fear from their faces and mingling with tears of relief.)  Now it is fully dark, with a pleasant drizzle and still some rumbling and flashing that may continue all night as the storm cells bounce around the mountains.  The air smells like wet smoke, aromatic desert plants, damp earth, and most of all, like RAIN.

This pomegranate is painted with four kinds of green clay (plus black shale and a bit of charred bone).  Green clays are sticky and always end up looking rather flat.  But the colors are worth it!  Two of these are glauconite (”terre verte”) from sedimentary rock, and two are bentonite and other clays from weathered volcanics.  Black “oil” shale and charred bone provide the dark accents.  For me the green clays have always conjured an image of a smooth round jar with multiple openings.  This represents the living, growing earth, and is connected to the Empress in the Tarot.  So it was a natural choice for this pomegranate design, which could be a storage jar, a pouring vessel, or a flute.

This one is painted in yellow ochre (iron hydroxide) and purpurite (manganese phosphate).  It is meant to be a soft, comforting shape inspired by two fungi:  the puffball Lycoperdon pyriforme, and the cup fungus Sarcosphaera coronaria.  (I have loved fungi since I was ten years old, and many of them have become part of my spirit, even though I rarely see anything but a few weird and rare desert fungi where I live now.)

This one is an iron furnace, and a scanning nightmare!  I’ll have to scan and adjust the orange part separately, and layer them in photoshop, since the original is bright but not as harsh as this picture.  Inspired by my own ironwork and by some Thai cooking pots that I’ve seen - they are nearly spherical and made of forged and riveted heavy scrap iron plate, with ornate handles and chains. (When the oil runs out and civilization falls apart, the blacksmiths of the Lands of the Tiger will rebuild the world out of scrap metal, using charcoal made from shattered houses…but only if the tiger survives.)  The iron is painted in magnetite, manganese oxide, and charred bone, overlain with blue vivianite.  Did I really need THREE black pigments?  Yes.  I have about a dozen in my palette, all different.  The fiery furnace is painted mostly with realgar (arsenic sulfide), a recent gift from a friend.  I am not usually a fan of the toxic pigments, but it’s a very tiny amount and I wanted to see how such a bright, hot color works with the rest of the mineral pigments, which are on the cool side.  The paint is actually a mix of red realgar (AsS) and yellow orpiment (As2S3).  Realgar isn’t stable and changes to orpiment when exposed to light.  That can take months for a crystal, but of course it’s nearly instantaneous with powdered pigment.  Pure orpiment is bright yellow.   Anway, the pigments that darken the edges of the fire are yellow ochre and orange AMD ochre (genuine Acid Mine Drainage iron sulfate from a Pennsylvania coal mine dump, toxic to creeks but not to humans, and a beautiful pigment).

I did work with some real iron today, and made a dozen tiny triangular bells for a shaman’s belt.  They still need clappers and a chain.  And I sketched the next few pomegranates - I already know how many I plan to paint…but how many do YOU think is enough?