MINERALARTS: Iron and Thorn

Mostly cloudy today, but cleared up in time to view the first half of the lunar eclipse.  Cloud veils are drifting in now, obscuring the red moon at totality, but we got a clear photo first, just as the coyotes began to howl.

Molten silver in the moment before melting, when the metal is still reflective, yet glows red from within…

Old carnelian bead, with the ghost of a white hydration rind from long burial in the earth…

Hammered copper vessel, riverworn, washed up among rocks, filled with glowing coals…

My moon oracles will need eclipse pictures - maybe Sarcographa tricosa or S. labyrinthica for the lichen oracle.  For the Sticks and Stones, perhaps a picture that combines both.

Two happy boys - they are best friends:

Last weekend we hiked in the hills south of our house, where grass, cactus, and thorny shrubs give way to agaves and desert oaks.  A hundred years ago, there were several active copper mines in the area, and while hiking we see glory holes, ore piles, old dirt roads, and a shiny black heap of slag that looks like a small mountain of obsidian.  I can imagine what it must have looked like at night, through the dusky coal smoke of the smelter - the molten metal glowing white, then darkening to red as the copper bars cooled; the fiery orange slag splashing onto the pile, reeking of sulfur - until one night around 1910, when the inevitable happened and a forest fire destroyed the smelter, and gave the land back to the yuccas and oaks.  But we have the collector’s instinct that drew the first miners here, and we pick through the slag and bring home a treasure trove of tiny glass drips that look like bones, twigs, or strange machine parts.  Some may find their way into jewelry, but I’ll just put most of them in a small copper bowl.

I don’t have a lot to say about this amulet.  Four inches long, four hot-forged pods - two copper, one steel, and one sterling silver.  It started out as something entirely different.  When the original idea didn’t work out, I nearly abandoned the pieces until I discovered how neatly the iron and silver pods fit together.  I knew that I needed to finish it that way, so I made the copper pods to go with it.  It seems appropriate for the dark moon.

The top stone on this pendant is a tiny slice of the Esquel pallasite that I bought several years ago.  The other stone is native terrestrial iron from Siberia, which I bought as a small slab and cut to match the pallasite.  Together they are an image of the boundary deep in the earth where the iron-magnesium silicates of the lower mantle give way to the pure nickel-iron of the core.  The iron hook is strung on a leather cord at the moment, but I plan to make a silver and iron chain for it.

Pallasites are rare meteorites that contain glassy transparent pale green or greenish-brown olivine crystals in an iron matrix.  They are some of the most spectacular of all rocks, and probably represent fragments of the interior of an ancient shattered proto-planet.  Each pallasite is unique in appearance.  Some have many olivine crystals, others have very few.  Some have large olivine crystals (the Esquel is especially notable for these) and others have tiny dustlike particles.  The iron matrix may be smooth and shining (as in Esquel) or it may reveal complex interlocking crystal patterns when etched (these are called Widmanstatten patterns, and were first described from meteorites but are also seen in certain steels, such as railroad rail welds).  The drawing below shows a tiny piece of the Imilac pallasite.  This meteorite was found as a few large pieces and many small fragments, most of  them with only the iron “skeleton” holding the remains of highly weathered olivine crystals. 

The other stone in the pendant is native iron from Siberia.  Pure iron metal is very rare in the earth’s rocks, since iron is unstable when oxygen is present, and usually combines with oxygen, silica, sulfur, and other elements to form many common minerals .  Metallic terrestrial iron is known from only a few localities.  The Siberian iron occurs as irregular blebs in a rock that is made mostly of altered olivine.

I finished the last of the Stick drawings.  This one represents the Third Quarter Moon.  For some reason, this is the most stylized and least realistic of the series, though that wasn’t intentional.  Minor changes will be made in a couple of the drawings before printing, but for now you can see how they all look together on the Moon Oracle page:

http://www.mineralarts.com/artwork/MoonOracle.html

The 8 Sticks are only half of a 16-card oracle.  With the next moon, I’ll begin drawing the 8 Stones that will complete the project.

I’m working on several paintings for a poster presentation that I’ll be taking to a botany conference in two weeks.  The poster is mostly about using handground mineral pigments in egg tempera for botanical illustration, but will also include scratchboard art and a couple of craft projects like this:

Jaguar Tracks in Blue Oak Canyon  10″x14″

Amate (Mexican bark paper, which represents rocks), muscovite and biotite mica flakes and powdered pearlescent mica pigment (flowing water), copper foil (blue oak leaves), gold metallic powders (acorns), silver scratchboard (forefoot track), red ochre (hind foot track), malachite and azurite pigments (the moon, and the copper ores which are found in the canyon).

TURQUOISE has been turning up more frequently in my art recently, and it looks like that will continue for awhile.  I have an ambivalent relationship with this stone.  I’m not fond of most turquoise jewelry or its various cultural trappings - my attraction to it is much more primitive.  My favorite cuts are the round “donut” discs with a hole in the center, large smooth but irregularly-shaped beads, and some very simple cabochons.  When I use it in jewelry, I’m trying for a look that is primitive but universal - something to display on a blanket on the ground, that could have come out of a trader’s pack yesterday or three thousand years ago.  I just finished this necklace of hammered and hot-forged copper, African cast-glass beads, a Chinese turquoise donut, and an antique Chinese cast-bronze bell (this is OLD, and the subtle design on the surface was worn and obscured long before the beautiful patina developed).  The bell has a lighter, more tinkly sound than my iron bells.

A few days ago, turquoise entered my creative life in a different way when I accepted a commission for a lion doll made with the same pattern as the one on my website.  But this one is to be a Tibetan snow lion, white with a turquoise mane.  I am already having fun planning his blanket and ornaments, even though I won’t be able to start on the project until after the botany conference.

For the Waxing Gibbous Moon, the Stick Oracle shows a gate built of two heavy Arizona madrone branches placed in a pile of stones on a small island.  The young bark of madrones is smooth and dark red, so it is shown in black here.  Older bark is nearly white and is broken up into small square blocks.  The poles crossing the forked top are made of peeled branches.  Old stumps, repeatedly healed after fire damage, fade into the background.

Just in time for the First Quarter Moon - the corresponding card in my Stick Oracle, showing two forked staves marking the confluence of two creeks.  Although carefully sketched before inking, these Stick cards (six so far, with two to go) have had a lot of reworking as each develops on the way to the completed drawing.  When they are done, I will make minor changes in all of them to improve the way they fit together.  All are powerful images for me, from long ago and far away - they seem to have always been with me.  Although several of them have motifs in common with the Wands in the Tarot, they are more complex than that (for example, they have water as well as wood and stone). 

Yesterday we went cranewatching and fernhunting, two activities that have special significance in southeastern Arizona.  Thousands of sandhill cranes spend part of the winter here, drawn to the warm weather, cornfields, and small artificial ponds.  A thousand years ago, they would have come for the natural cienegas (marshes) and grasslands that have now vanished.  Their wild, primitive cries and whistling feathers swirl over us now - voice of the High Plains wind, ice on the Platte River, and that older Ice that never reached the desert, but still colors the feathers of the wildest of birds.

We watched several barn owls fluttering in a willow thicket - pale soft wings flickering among tangled twigs - and found a sleeping long-eared owl nearly invisible beside a willow trunk.  A small flock of snow geese gathered on the pond and a ferruginous hawk - another Plains visitor - hunted in a field.  Then it was time to follow the gravel road over the hills and admire the view of distant mountain ranges while we hunted for two rare ferns among the limestone outcrops.  They are Mexican plants that enter the U.S. only in extreme southeastern Arizona and the Big Bend region of Texas.  I found them and a couple of other ferns, and added all four to my online fern guide.

http://www.mineralarts.com/ferns/DesertFernsGuide.html 

A couple of days ago I made these simple earrings as a demonstration for a friend, showing two different sizes of copper wire:  14 gauge spirals and 16 gauge loops for the African cast glass beads.