Page 22 - the NOISE January 2015

22 • january 2015 • the NOISE arts & news • thenoise.us
ARtSBrieFs:
eye CAndy
This January Arizona Handmade Gallery/ Fire on the Mountain, 13 N. San Francisco, features delicious Eye Candy jewelry by native Arizonan Chelsea stone.
A graduate of Northern Arizona University, Ms. Stone re- ceived her degree in jewelry with a minor in business and re- ceived her MFA in Metals at Texas Tech. “I moved to Prescott with the hopes of joining their cooperative gallery, where I showed my jewelry as a group owner for 10 years,” Ms. Stone tells me. “That experience working with the public and other artists was invaluable and showed me the ropes in how to make a living as a professional artist. I also taught jewelry making at Yavapai College and NAU, as well as classes out of my home studio.”
Ms. Stone has three jewelry lines: Glass Bead Eye Candy, Cast Glass Eye Candy, and Eye Candy Metal. To make these unique pieces she uses a flame torch to heat a glass rod to 1700 de- grees. When the end of the glass rod reaches a consistency of honey, she begins to shape the now pliable glass around a mandrel and uses various tools to add texture and detail. After shaping the glass to the desired design, it is then annealed in a kiln at 970 degrees.
“My jewelry designs are colorful and witty, often invoking a smile from those who see my work, as well as from those who
wear it,” Ms. Stone says. “I combine glass, enamel, and recycled objects into wearable fun. The enameling process al- lows me to cover a base metal (copper) with powders and when fired in a kiln, imparts incredible color to the metal. Folks who see my work often say, ‘It really is Eye Candy!’ I have been a daily maker of things from a very young age and feel fortunate to make art for a living. It’s hardly work when I get to play in my studio every day.”
During a good portion of the year Ms. Stone and her partner Alex Horst, who is also a jeweler, travel to high end craft festivals to sell their jewelry. “We consider ourselves art gypsies and love to travel the country sharing our designs near and far,” Ms. Stone says. “When not making jewelry I can be found drinking wine with friends and belly dancing with Why Not? Belly Dance in beautiful Prescott, AZ.”
Azhandmade.com
A neW yeAR At the ARtiStS’ GALLeRy
lee Hughes shows me a selection of his lathe shaped bowls, plates, jewelry trees, and other functional and decorative pieces he shows year round at The Artists’ Gallery.
“A lot of my material is from logs, pieces of wood we pick up, and firewood,” Mr. Hughes tells me. “All the pine that I bring in comes from the Shultz burn area, the Aspen comes from the Peaks, the Junipers are from the east of town and the Gamble Oaks come from the west of town. I try to use a lot of local woods.”
Most of his pieces are made from wood that has been repur- posed. One plate is made from a bulletin board that someone had thrown away in the alley behind the Artists’ Gallery. “Every piece I do speaks to me and a lot of pieces have stories con- nected to them,” Mr. Hughes says. “This piece is all cedar and this was a frame around a bulletin board that was thrown out by the dumpsters. So I collected the wood and made something out of it.”
Though he has been working with wood his entire life, first building houses, he didn’t begin making art pieces until about five years ago. “I had an old lathe that someone had given me about 20 years ago that was just sitting in the corner,” he says.
“My daughter was into martial arts and wanted some martial arts weapons. I said I’d try it and it just took a life of its own.”
To create a piece, Mr. Hughes uses a lathe, as the wood spins
at high speeds, he uses tools to shave, shape, sand, smooth and
polish the wood into the desired finished piece. When he begins,
though he may have an idea in mind, the wood he is working with reveals to him what the piece will become. “Some- times I see it, most of the time it unfolds; it tells me what it wants to be,” he says. “The shapes just take on themselves. Of course, it depends on the piece of wood; the shapes come as you’re turning it. Very few things are pre-planned.”
Mr. Hughes uses the natural imperfections in the wood to add to the beauty of a piece, filling a small crack with tiny pieces of turquoise or some other semiprecious gem, a touch so subtle that it almost goes unseen if not viewed closely. “This piece came off the Peaks,” he says of a bowl made from Douglas fir that has kept some of the roughness of the
natural wood. He shows me where the limb begins and an area of the piece that is burl wood. “That refers to uncon- trolled growth that is caused by Mistletoe. Mistletoe got in there and the tree tried to kill it by pumping extra sap to it to try to flush out the parasite and that caused uncontrolled growth. That’s why sometimes you’ll see Douglas firs that are really tiny, but you see a limb that’s huge, and then you see the mistletoe growing.”
linda russell shows me her most recent paintings that are on display—outdoor scenes of all seasons inspired by the natural beauty that surrounds the Flagstaff area. One painting stands out from the rest—framed under a window from an old Clarkdale home that she found in a Cottonwood antique store.