My Personal Style

My personal style centers on a few key elements. Ilike to...

- Mix colors in unexpected ways, particularly colors you would not ordinarily assume would complement one another

- Use a lot of what are called "grays", such as black diamond, montana blue, colorado topaz, alexandrite, and other "simultaneity effects"

- Combine both bead weaving, bead stringing, and wire-working techniques within the same piece.

- Modify traditional weaving and stringing techniques

- Define and play with forms and themes, and thresholds, frames and transititions from one form to the next

- Have pieces that emphasize the sensual and sexual

- Create unusual, unexpected placement of shapes, such as using curved tubes where you might expect a straight tube instead, or using a cube where you would expect a flat rondelle

- Add dimensionality, curvature, and interlocking forms, where I can, to make my pieces both fashionable and contemporary

- Add a sense of movement and move-ability, wherever possible, and likewise, anticipate the aesthetic and functional impacts and effects which come from movement when worn

- Push the limits of, and experiment with, the materials and techniques I am using

- Organize my pieces into Series I call "Collections." For each Collection, I study a particular culture or technique or design theory, and play with what I've learned. How can I adopt what I've learned to my individual style and approach? Each Collection, then, is a personal challenge of expression and expressiveness.

 

--- Warren Feld

The DESIGN Perspective
On Beading and Jewelry Making

The DESIGN PERSPECTIVE is very focused on teaching beaders and jewelry makers how to make choices. Choices about what materials to include, and not to include. Choices about strategies and techniques of construction. Choices about mechanics. Choices about aesthetics. Choices about how best to evoke emotions.

These choices must also reflect an understanding of the bead and its related components. How do all these pieces, in conjunction with stringing materials, assert their needs? Their needs for color, light and shadow. Their needs for durability, flexibility, drape, movement and wearability. Their needs for social or psychological or cultural or contextual appropriateness -- an appropriateness that has to do with satisfaction, beauty, fashion and style, as well as power and influence.

This DESIGN PERSPECTIVE contrasts with the more predominant Craft Approach, where the beader or jewelry maker merely follows a set of steps and ends up with something. Here, in this step-by-step approach, all the choices have been made for them.

And this DESIGN PERSPECTIVE also contrasts with another widespread approach to beading and jewelry making – the Art Tradition – which focuses on achieving ideals of beauty, whether the jewelry is worn or not. Here the beader or jewelry maker learns to apply art theories learned by painters and sculptors, and assumed to apply equally to beads and jewelry, as well.

The Craft Approach and the Art Tradition ignore too much of the functional essence of jewelry. Because of this, they often steer the beader and jewelry maker in the wrong directions. Making the wrong choices. Exercising the wrong judgments. Applying the wrong tradeoffs between aesthetics and functionality.

The focus of the DESIGN PERSPECTIVE is strategic thinking. At the core of this thinking are a series of design principles and their skillful applications. These principles go beyond a set of techniques. These principles and the strategies for applying them provide the beader and jewelry maker with some clarity in a muddled world.

The belief here is that there are many different kinds of information that must come together and be applied. It is impossible to clearly learn and integrate this information all at once. When learned haphazardly or randomly, as most people do, it becomes problematic. It becomes more difficult or too confusing to successfully bring to bear all these kinds of things the beader or jewelry maker needs to know when designing and constructing a piece of jewelry in the moment. Thus, the beader and jewelry maker best learn all this related yet disparate information in a developmental order, based on some coherent grammer or set of rules of design. By learning within this organized structure and informational hierarchy, the jewelry artist best sees how everything interrelates and comes together. This is the DESIGN PERSPECTIVE.

So, we begin with a Core set of skills and concepts, and how these are interrelated and applied. Then we move on to a Second Set of skills and concepts, their interrelationships and applications, and identifying how they are related to the Core. And onward again to a Third Set of skills and concepts, their interrelationships and applications and relationship to the Second Set and the Core, and so forth.

In the DESIGN PERSPECTIVE, “Jewelry” is understood as Art, but is only Art as it is worn. It is not considered Art when sitting on a mannequin or easel. Because of this, the principles learned through Craft or Art are important, but not sufficient for learning good jewelry design and fashioning good jewelry.

Learning good jewelry design creates its own challenges. All jewelry functions in a 3-dimensional space, particularly sensitive to position, volume and scale. Jewelry must stand on its own as an object of art. But it must also exist as an object of art which interacts with people (and a person’s body), movement, personality, and quirks of the wearer, and of the viewer, as well as the environment and context. Jewelry serves many purposes, some aesthetic, some functional, some social and cultural, some psychological.

The focus of the DESIGN PERSPECTIVE is on the parts. How do you choose them? How should they be used, and not be used? How do you assemble them and combine them in such a way that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts? How do you create and build in support systems within your jewelry to enable that greater movement, more flexibility, better draping, longer durability? How do you best use all these parts, making them resonate and evoking that emotional response from your audience to your style, vision and creative hand that you so desire?

The beader and jewelry maker are seen as multi-functional professionals, similar to an architect who builds houses and an engineer who builds bridges. In all these cases, the professional must bring a lot of very different kinds of skills and abilities to bear, when constructing, whether house or bridge or jewelry. The professional has to be able to manage artistic design, functionality, and the interaction of the object with the person and that person’s environment.

Read: ABOUT GOOD JEWELRY DESIGN: Principles of Composition