Excerpt: Daniel Brush: Jewels Sculpture

d r e a M C aT C H e r s when daniel Brush was 13, his mother took him on a trip to europe. at the Victoria & albert Museum in london, he saw a gold bowl from seventh century BC etruria that lit a spark in him. lined with a thin sheet of gold and ornamented with complex patterns of granulation, this bowl was said to have been found in a tomb at Palestrina (ancient Praeneste), west of rome. Granulation is an ancient technique that has captivated and mystified goldsmiths for centuries, whereby minute spheres of gold are fused imperceptibly to a gold surface, creating the impression of a haze of gold dust. while the earliest known examples of gold granulation date to third millennium BC sumeria, in southern Mesopotamia, the etruscans, who flourished from the eighth to the third centuries BC in what is now central italy, perfected the technique between 700 and 600 BC, creating objects of great sophistication. since his encounter with the etruscan bowl, Brush has been enthralled by gold, both its physical properties and its meaning to the ancients who believed it to be a sign of the divine and to possess the power of the sun and the life force itself. Brush says gold helped him see the light. in 1967 he made Olivia’s wedding ring—a Hercules knot, fused without solder—from an ounce of gold purchased for $35.50. a recurring motif in the jewellery of classical Greece, the knot of Hercules is a symbol of eternity and of the indissoluble ties of love and commitment. Brush wanted to work in gold and pay homage to the ancients. He wanted, he says, to find out if he could do what the etruscans did. so, with characteristic erudition and intense focus, he set about teaching himself: researching, reading, and experimenting over months of trial and error. He studied littledale’s analysis and methodology, published in the 1930s, when the mystery of granulation was being re-examined and unravelled. He immersed himself in texts on etruscan culture, envisioning how people lived. He concluded: “Granulation had to have been done by a young girl with small hands,” and goldsmithing had to be a communal activity. “i had to obviate my eye, the cost, the years dedicated to this work. i thought, ‘How do i become a twelve-year-old etruscan girl?’” The First Dome [page ref] is a small cylindrical steel object whose circumference is punctuated by granulated gold and which is surmounted by a 22-karat gold granulated dome. it is one of a series of objects worked with granulation Brush created between 1973 and 1993. He made the components himself from raw materials and using four different tools, sculpting 78,000 gold granules measuring seven-one thousandths of an inch each. He then spent months using a single-hair sable brush to apply each granule to the gold dome temporarily before attempting to fuse them. But fusing the grains to the base of gold proved to be a devilish challenge: a few seconds too few and the grains would fall off, a few too many and they would melt into a blob. He let the dome sit for two years before Olivia gently persuaded him to revisit it. The result is a masterpiece. 46 © 2018 Rizzoli International Publications. All Rights Reserved.

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