This page is a gallery of finished work that I’ve done over the years! Some is from the last few weeks or months, and some goes back several years. I’ve been metalsmithing for 25 years, and have made over 10,000 pieces of jewelry, so this is a pretty incomplete collection!
Check out our Etsy store to support an independent artist and purchase Robert’s jewelry work! https://www.etsy.com/shop/GrindstoneMountain
16 Lapis Rings, March of 2021
Cambrian trilobites and a chondrite meteorite, the oldest material on earth. This one was about 'deep time.'
I enjoy mixing gold and silver. I like how the metals look next to one another.
It's hard to go wrong with pyritized ammonite fossils. They are almost jewelry before you even start working with them!
The words 'Lapis Lazuli' translate from their ancient linguistic roots as 'Stone of Azure Blue.' The stone has been in use with such reverence for so long that the words in several languages evolved inseparable from the name of the gem, so that the gem itself is an adjective or even noun, the name of the the very concept of blue. Lapis Lazuli is not the color of the sky, the sky and waters are lazuli, lazur, azure... blue. And this makes sense, as there are few such vivid and stable hues in all of nature. Lapis was also what was meant in medieval uses of the word sapphire, from the Greek 'sappheiros' and Hebrew 'sappir,' until that word was borrowed, recently, to describe the stone we know by that name now. The material has been mined and used in jewelry and ornaments in the ancient Indus Valley, Persia, and elsewhere for at least 9000 years! It was used as a gem in King Tut's mask, colored walls and statues in early and classical Greece and Rome, and was crushed to make some of the finest and most expensive paints in the flourishing of Renaissance Europe. It was Michelangelo's blue in the Sistine Chapel sky. The symbolism of Lapis Lazuli is as broad and deep as it's history. Valuable, treasured, and occasionally sacred, in Asia, Africa, and Europe alike, it has been a symbol of ancient Annona, the goddess of love and war, Maat, the Egyptian goddess of truth, and was, for several hundred years, a near requirement in depictions of the Christian Mary, giving identity to the figure in much Byzantine and Renaissance art. It has, for at least a couple thousand years, been associated with luck, warding off the 'evil eye,' and in medieval Europe, was said to cure anger and stupidity. Would that it could, the world would be less blue by benefit of such an azure boon. But here, have your own, and happily wear it! You'll be in good company of goddesses and kings, of Mary, Maat, and Michelangelo! I've just finished the final steps of work making 14 new high-grade Lapis Lazuli pendants, and they are all now available in the Etsy store at: https://www.etsy.com/shop/GrindstoneMountain
The brown stones in all of these pendants are chondrite meteorites, the oldest thing you can ever hold in your hand! I think chondrite meteorites are very nearly the most fascinating things on earth. First off, they fell from space and are the literal oldest thing that you can ever see and hold in your hand on this planet. They are over 4.56 billion years old. There are certainly older objects somewhere out in space, in other solar systems or in the vast expanses in between, but these are the absolute oldest objects that we have ever found on earth. They are older than the planet. They pre-date the light from the most distant star that you can see in the sky. They are 70 times older than the last big dinosaurs and 23,000 times as old as the first humans like us. They are a third as old as the big bang. And they are time capsules! They are nebula; bits of a cloud of dust gathered from at least 5 giant ancient stars that we think gave birth to nearly a thousand new stars, including ours, from the remnants they left behind. Each grain of rock or metal that clumped together to form them had its own history, swirling through space like smoke or ashes, while a star and planets were formed nearby. As our star began to settle, the nebula dispersed, and the other stars born from that dusty womb scattered across the galaxy, the chondrites cooled and slept. They waited. While some of the planets froze and hundreds of others collided, shattered, then fell into the growing giants, Saturn, Jupiter, and the Sun, the chondrites waited. While planets cooled and seas formed on Earth and Mars, while Mars dried out and became a desert and Earth turned green, they waited, sleeping in a vast orbit between Mars and Jupiter. And then, 4.56 billion long years after they cooled from the exhalation of stars and formed clumps of solidifying dust, they got kicked out their stable orbit out past Mars, in the asteroid belt, and looped in towards the sun. The rest is history. They crossed Earth's path, got caught in the planet's gravity, and fell. And we get to hold them - time capsules from the dawn of time, the afterbirth of stars, floor sweepings from the workshop in which planets are crafted, sparks from the anvils of the ancient primordial titans - cooled and fallen stars.
I'm a huge fan of the steampunk aesthetic! I really liked how this set came out.
I thought that this old vacuum tube was so cool looking it deserved to be in a piece of jewelry, so I made a steampunk piece out of it.
This sterling cross was about a 10 inches tall, and was very heavy. It was a wall hanging. It sold immediately.
Most of these are turquoise from Bisbee, Arizona, but the long ones are made with turquoise from Hubei.
I made this crown with Spencer Idaho opals.