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Todd
Alan: the Artist and His Life
"After
becoming intrigued by gemstones and crystals in 1986, I started
teaching myself jewelry work and gemstone properties. During
that time, I found a crystal that I mounted in steel wire and wore it
as a necklace. Friends soon asked me to make necklaces for
them. So I purchased some sterling silver wire and began my
experiments. After I had created a dozen or so pieces, I
displayed them at an event where they sold well.
After
experimenting with pounds of copper and bronze wire, I began to
discover my own style of working wire. I avoided the study of
existing styles because I wanted to develop my own style without
being too influenced by others. For the next few years, I kept
making pendants and earrings with crystals and tumbled stones while I
looked for ways to make rings and nicer jewelry with faceted stones.
By
chance or destiny, I found myself merchanting at a show next to a
fine wireworker named Wayne Wirebender. Wayne could shape
copper and silver wire into amazing wire jewelry as well as
intricate, realistic sculptures. After several days of getting
to know each other, Wayne helped me learn my first braid. For
many years after that, Wirebender and I would meet at different shows
and share ideas with each other. If not for his sad death
several years ago, I'm sure we would be still be meeting each other
at shows and sharing our art with each other like brothers of an
ancient guild. His kind sharing of his skills helped me to
create many different types of braids. My jewelry became more
and more elaborate. I progressed from being a wireworker to a
jeweler who uses wire as a structural element in my jewelry
With
the birth of our first daughter in 1990, my wife Charlene and I
opened a storefront art gallery in Peninsula, Ohio. During the
decade that we operated Creations Gallery in the Cuyahoga Valley, I
honed my skill as a jeweler at my bench there. I kept experimenting
with ways to make my jewelry stronger and more interesting. I
bought a torch and started teaching myself soldering and fusing.
Because of my long experience in working with round wire, I found
ways to melt little sections in drips by fusing pieces of silver
together without solder.
I
later found out this technique is called "fusing."
Very few jewelers ever use this technique because of the split-second
timing it takes to melt the right amount of metal ends together
without accidentally melting the entire piece of jewelry. For
many years now, I have worked on mastering this art in combination
with my unique style of shaping and bending round strands of gold and silver.
Creations
Gallery was located in the blacksmith shop of the historic canal-era
village. We put up a trellis over our garden porch and planted
a Wisteria vine, an offshoot of a vine bought from China on a clipper
ship by Julian Kubinyi. The Kubinyis were one of the prominent
art families who first settled in the Cuyahoga Valley in the early
1900's. When this spectacular vine flowers each May, people
drive by to take pictures and smell the enchanting fragrance of the blooms.
We
became known in the area for fine and exotic gemstones and Todd's
distinctive jewelry. Our store was quite beautiful and
glittered with stained glass hanging throughout. We also
featured the work of potters, beaders, woodworkers, and weavers.
At that time, downtown Peninsula was filled with galleries and
artist's studios. Along with other professional artists and
local entrepreneurs, we become founding members in the Peninsula Area
Chamber of Commerce. We were warmly accepted in the community
and our second daughter was born there.
While
Creations Gallery was operating, we also showed our work at many
events throughout the year and throughout the country. We
traveled to many, many shows on many themed circuits - art shows, gem
and mineral shows, fantasy and progressive culture events,
renaissance/medieval and metaphysical shows. We exhibited quite
often at large international gem and mineral shows (Cleveland area)
where I found wonderful stones for my jewelry and gained a vast
knowledge of various gemstones.
While
we loved the fine people of Peninsula, we knew our stay in the
Cuyahoga Valley was not our final stop. Charlene and I had long
dreamed of living a rural country life in community with like-minded
people. In 1996, we discovered the perfect land and
founded Wisteria, an intentional land-based community. With
other families, we worked together to build an event site campground
and the infrastructure for a village. Families starting
building homes and having children. Parents purchased adjoining
land to be near their children and grandchildren. After four
years of traveling back and forth from Wisteria to Peninsula, we
decided to make the leap of faith to the rolling foothills of the
Appalachian Mountains.
In
October of 2000, much to the dismay of our loyal customers, we
closed our store and moved to Wisteria . With our family and
community, we are very, very happy to have a nurturing and beautiful
natural place to live our lives. I now work at my bench making
jewelry for our internet customers. From my window, I look out
onto the grassy hills and forests of our land. Dreams can come true.
My
work is always evolving because I don't like repetition and am
always seeking new ways to create new additions to my style. I think
of my jewelry surviving as heirloom pieces treasured for generations,
which I believe has helped me create a truly unique and beautiful
form of fine jewelry unlike any other work I have seen anywhere.
Via
our website, we continue our long-standing reputation of courteous
and personal customer service. We understand how important,
personal, and symbolic this kind of jewelry is for people. Our
decade of experience from owning and operating a retail storefront
taught us how to provide good service and good quality products to
our internet customers. We realized that we still
operated a store in a sense -- now we show our work in a virtual
gallery and people from all over the world now enjoy finding and
shopping for my jewelry.
While
we don't travel to shows like we once did, we still travel each year
to Pennsic, the annual national gathering for the Society for
Creative Anachronism (SCA). We are members of this fabulous
medieval historical reenactment group and love to spend part of each
August in this creative recreation of medieval life. Imagine
over 10,000 people camped together for weeks dressed in medieval
clothing with armored warriors and royalty and period arts and
dancing and performance . . . it is like nothing else on the planet.
I'm
always interested in taking special orders because I like making
pieces of jewelry that people will hold special and know it is truly
unique and reflective of their ideas. Send me your sketches and
photos, and I'll tell you if I can make a custom piece for you that
is within my style and abilities. Thank you for taking the time
to learn a little of my history as an art jeweler. If you have
any questions or comments, please feel free to call me or e-mail me."
--
Todd Alan
More
Todd Alan Jewelry at toddalanstudios.com
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