OUR STORY|THE INSPIRATION
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Random Acts of Beauty
“Beauty awakens the soul to act.”
- Dante Alighieri
Creating jewelry is one of the ways in which I commit random acts of beauty. A Random Act of Beauty is the idea that beauty can be found anywhere and everywhere, often with an element of surprise. You yourself can perpetrate random acts of beauty - doing a good deed, creating a delicious meal, celebrating the coming of spring. Random Acts of Beauty can enrich the environment as a whole by drawing attention to the the more pleasant and visually appealing aspects of life. I hope that my jewelry in some small way might have this effect.
History and Culture
“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Jewelry design has been a wonderful means of expressing my love of world history and its cultures. As a child, my bedtime stories were of history - rich tales of true events that had happened in faraway places and exotic cultures. Fascinated with the intrigues of palace life in the Renaissance, and the adventures of travelers throughout Europe and Asia, I reveled in the details - how these people looked and dressed, what motivated and inspired them. Later, formally studying history and art, and traveling to some of these places, I sought to find a way to integrate all these images and experiences into my own artwork.
Natural Beauty and Mathematics
"Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have been hidden from us forever."
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The natural world is an integral source of ideas for the patterns and textures of the jewelry I create. In Nature, beauty may seem random, but there is a subtle order to the world around us that reveals itself as we come to understand more about science and mathematics. Fractals for example - the mathematical concept of infinitely repeating, self-similar patterns - express themselves throughout the natural world from the arrangement of matter at subatomic levels to the orbits of planets, shapes of galaxies, and beyond. The branching of a tree, and the rings within its trunk, ripples in water, the delicate structure of crystals and snowflakes or a tendril of smoke, and the patterns in stone and sand, all can be expressed or explained by fractal mathematics. The "golden ratio", a geometric proportion of particular harmony - also known as the "Fibonacci sequence" of numbers, turns up the layout of the human body, the curves of a nautilus shell, the spacing of flower petals, the growth of honeybee colonies and the structure of DNA.
Just as mathematics show us nature's order they also lend insight into the chaos that exists to balance it. Fractals and the Fibonacci sequence have been used to describe the formation of storm fronts, the movement of financial markets, and the evolution of consciousness.
The more our understanding of the world advances, the more we become aware of the infinite connectedness of things, which is in itself a beautiful thought. To know and observe this fills me with a sense of awe and wonder, which fuels my desire to create beautiful things for others to enjoy.
To learn more about the me or the jewelry I create, please visit the Our Story|The Designer page, or the Our Story|The Jewelry page.