Expressions in Flight

When I was a kid, many years ago, we used to have this gizmo, I guess you could call it a toy. It wasn’t much to look at but it facinated me. We called it a sky hook. It was just a kind of curly cue shaped thing made of cardboard or wood. What was magic was if you put a wide enough belt in a slot in the middle of it, you could hang it off the edge of a table from the very tip of the hook at the other end and it would seem to balance in the air. That’s the point of the gull (dark green nephrite jade from Alaska) and the owl in this sculpture, (very light green, called white nephrite jade, also called mutton fat, that is no longer mined. I bought it from a Korean War veteran. The source stopped because the only place it ever came from according to him is smack in the middle of the DMZ between the two Koreas, the Demilitarized Zone which is a no man’s land where many lost their lives 50 years ago).

So the two birds hang like sky hooks balancing only by their beaks. Meanwhile the duck (Siberian Jade) is just taking off in flight and the sparrow, a catseye beryl from New Hampshire, is in midflight.

Under the birds are two pieces of Rutillated Quartz; one is Brazialian and has the typical bladed crystals of rutile which is a titanium oxide ore and the other is sometimes called "angel hair rutillated" because the crystals are very fine and in this case are also curved (source unknown).

Under the quartz are two more quartzes. One is a black Chalcedony from Africa by way of a man in Texas and the base stone is a red Jasper or Chert, sometimes called Mookaite, from Western Australia. So you see the sources of this sculpture cover much of the world. The challenge is to balance both birds on top at the same time and to keep the other two off the ground.

Price: $2500