Ruth Finkelstein Jewelry Designer

I have been MIA, again and haven’t written very much lately.
I prefer writing in English for some strange reason or other, maybe because it was my first reading language, and although I have lived in Israel for over 30 years now, I suppose the first language that you hear, speak and read will always be the one that you are in the end more comfortable with.
The first intention of this blog was to make my self known to English speaking people in other countries, that don’t have the opportunity to pop by the studio to see what I am up to.
Now that I have it up and running again, I find that it is no good for me to send links to Israeli clients because for them, reading English is more often than not, like reading a foreign language, so I am missing the benefit of keeping a lot of my clients up to date with what I am doing.
So, I have resigned myself to the fact that this blog should be bilingual; the only question now, is how to attain that. Should I write a paragraph in English and then translate it into Hebrew?
Or should I write the same post twice - once in Hebrew and once in English?
How should I make sure that people that only read English for example, don’t need to tire their scrolling finger by having to scroll passed multiple Hebrew posts ,and vice versa of course.
And most of all, how do I keep it looking elegant, and not like a hodge podge and a big mess.
I am researching that right now, and will be back soon with my conclusions.
Till then - Lehitraot.

I have been MIA fro the passed week, and for that I am truly sorry. A lot has happened, and basically I was just to busy to find the time or the availability of mind to post.

I have quite a few new pieces ready, and am pretty frustrated at  the thought of photographing them, do to my regular complaints about photographing.

I have been asking around thinking about the issue, but as of yet have not done another trial to see how I can get my pics looking a bit more like my work, so you will have to take my word for it… my new work is really lovely.

But that is not what I wanted to write about today, in fact, it is exactly what I didn’t want to write about today.

Over the weekend, I had an open studio day, and one of the artists I invited to participate was a painter, called Osnat Shahar, who’s main focus is painting madalas.

She also teaches workshops to both adults and kids and that is what she actually came her to market.

In order to do that, she bought ready made mandalas that she had drawn and photocopied, just in outlines (making something that was fun to color in) and she was selling them for a symbolic amount of money, to let people experience the mandala.

I realized, after looking at her work, that I had unknowingly been drawing mandalas of sorts for years and years, like most people, and of course jumped on the opportunity of sitting and coloring in one of her mandalas.

Because we were quite busy, it took me the better part of the day, to finish it, and I was delighted with the result.

Osnat noticed that I had started coloring it in from the outer border, mentioned it to me and made me realize that that is pretty much an MO of mine. I skirt along the walls, afraid to approach the center…

She suggested that the I try to draw one myself, but start if from the centre. I didn’t have time to do that during the open studio. but the next day I had a meeting with my networking group, and I was doodling, as I usually do. I noticed that I was    drawing mandalas, from the centre out, after I had done a couple without paying much attention to what I was doing.

1rst Mandala

Once I started to pay attention to what I was doing, I noticed that the rhythm of the mandala will make you take certain steps in drawing the next round, and will result in something completely different than what you would have drawn if you weren’t really working on a pattern.

2nd mandala

A while back, I posted about looking for some daily visual creative outlet that didn’t necessarily have to do with jewelry, and wouldn’t demand more than 15 minutes a day of my time - I think I have found it.

One of my favorite trees to watch blossom is the pomegranate.

pomegranate flower

photo credit creative commons license

Its like a never ending burst of beauty, constantly changing, always surprising.

Even when they drop from the tree, they don’t loses there wonder

Blossoms

Blossom

Garnets are often represented by pomegranates in Greek mythology, and are closely connected with both love and war….

Since I am obviously in love with the pomegranate, that will be the subject of today’s story.

Persephone was not one of the goddesses of the Olympus, she lived far from the rest, planting seeds and taking care of plants, and a bunch of the gods were wooing her, among them Hades who decided to abduct her and take for his own, down to the underworld. Without Persephone life came to a standstill, nothing grew or blossomed and hunger ruled.
Zeus decided to put a stop to it and sent Hermes down to the underworld to retrieve her from Hades and the underworld.
Hades knew he couldn’t refuse Zeus on this, but didn’t want to leave Persephone so he gave her a pomegranate, to eat, knowing full well that when she saw the beauty and tasted the sweetness she would return to him.
And so she did. Every year for 6 months she would go down to Hades and the underworld, winter would descended on earth, leaving only when she reappeared every year,  bringing spring with her.

Since then, it has been a well known fact that the sure fire way to make sure your lover returns to you is by giving them a garnet.

dd couple earrings 22 k gold garnet peridot moonstone 14 karat gold

A trend that I am seeing in more and more blogs of other artists is daily something or others. Some do a daily sketch, and posts it, others do a small daily painting, or collage…ect.

Every time I run into this on the blogsphere I get intensely jealous.

Its quite amusing and silly that I get jealous of this, because all it would take for me to join the trend is to decide what I am going to do daily, and to do it and to commit to it.

Of course committing is the most difficult part, and that is probably where the jealousy comes from - the fact that they have already made the decision to commit.

A long time ago I read a book called The Artists Way but Julia Cameron, in which there are all sorts of exercises that promote creativity, one of them being morning pages.

Each morning, before you did anything else (even brush teeth or have coffee) you had to sit down and write 3 pages by hand. The content of these pages was completely unimportant, in fact, if I remember correctly, the recommendation was never to let anyone else read them and not even to read them yourself - thus avoiding any kind of judgment on what you were writing, allowing complete freedom to write well or terribly or Sanskrit, if you so desired. A lot of people I know, actually would finish writing their 3 pages and then destroy them immediately.

Anyway, I did morning pages for quite a while, until an especially nosey boyfriend read them… and in one second flat all of the fun and freedom was squeezed out of them, and of course I stopped writing them.

One of the things that I enjoyed about them most was the fact that in time, the kind of creativity that it promoted was completely different from making or designing or thinking about jewelry, which is great for inspiration. It was similar to unboxing brain cells that have long been bubble wrapped and putting them to use again.

If I commit to doing daily’s again, I would want it to be something, anything in fact that is not part of my daily tasks and routines. So writing or making jewelry is not what I am looking for.

I would love to commit to a drawing/ painting a day. When I start this ( I need to build up my resolve and think about how it will fit in my day, and especially how long or short a time I will spend on doing it a day.

It can’t be to long, since the day has only 24 hours, and doing a daily would completely miss the point and have a very short life if it takes up to much time.

Also, at least at first, I will treat it like the morning pages, and keep it completely private.

In my previous life, before kid’s career and husband, I use to take time to sketch. It has been so long since I have done anything like that and I would love to regain my confidence in this area.

Maybe my daily’s should be sketches.

We’ll see.

I have been seeing and reading a lot about the indestructibility of Tungsten rings and how very very strong they are. In fact, their hardness, which is 9 on the Mohr scale (diamonds being 10) does give them a lot of strength, but they are in no way indestructible.

Indestructible or not, extremely strong or not, I still find myself asking a very basic question here - how many people run around smacking their hands with hammers? (Those who do should be worried about more than their rings…) Its a bit of an overkill - gold might be a lot softer, but in all my years of making jewelry, maybe 3 people came back with squashed rings, and that wasn’t because they hit them with a hammer…and they were easily repaired and reshaped.