A Copper Alliance Member
Copper in the Arts
Copper Sonja: Beautiful and Unusual Mixed Metal Jewelry
Copper-Silver Fern Necklace
Photograph Courtesy of Sonja Voss
"There are way more possibilities with copper,” Voss says. “You can add to it, solder on other metals or objects and it never looks overloaded. I like the warmth and health benefits of copper.”
A few years ago, Voss was in an accident that resulted in broken bones and severely injured her hands, she crafted copper rings that she credits with helping her heal faster.
Voss describes her design ideas as "coming on the go." Her table is always piled high with hundreds of objects. Her eyes will fix on something like a hammered circle as she passes by and she starts working with it. She never uses sketches to create her jewelry and nothing is ever exactly like another. Items such as her hammered copper pretzel earrings evoke memories of her German heritage.
Sometimes Voss uses sheets of copper, sometimes wire or tubes. All her copper is recycled, coming from salvage yards. Friends who are roofers provide some materials. She hand-hammers, assembles and solders all her jewelry, makes all her own rivets and has easily adapted her goldsmith work to copper creations.
Mixed Metal Copper Wedding Band
Photograph Courtesy of Sonja Voss
Her ring designs employ unusual copper wrapping techniques and may contain adornments like sterling silver hearts on heavily textured copper. These are treated with a microcrystalline museum wax so they won't tarnish the fingers and can include circles, dots or flower patterns. PlayToy is a solid copper ring with sterling silver in a "movable granulation" technique. Hammered, textured earrings with hanging garnets or pearls might dangle back and forth to show off shiny or black oxidized copper.
Voss also created a line of ID tags available in copper and bronze with heart shapes, love birds and other etched designs as well as words/names.
"I recently started playing around with a pre-Valentine's Day heart,” she says. ‘I wanted to do something different. So I cut out a copper heart, soldered on a bronze frame and added special chalkboard paint to create a necklace.
She enjoys teaching jewelry craft classes at her CopperSonja studio in Philadelphia, PA and believes that anything is easy to do when you really want to.
“But learning does take time and many people just don't want to make that commitment,” she says. “My advice to new copper artists is to just stick with it.”
Resources:
Darby Patterson: Love in Bronze
A bronze cast of the Chinese character for love.
Photograph courtesy of Darby Patterson
“I start with a picture and a vision and a lump of clay and marry those two together – then I have this thing that never existed before in front of me,” says Patterson. “Some people can draw. I didn’t discover this until I was 55, 56 – that I could sit down with clay and do this; it came naturally, it was remarkable. I had no teaching, no training.”
Patterson’s son Rene Steinke, a renowned glassblower, began his craft at age 16; and her daughter, Ianna Nova Frisby, became a ceramic artist and art teacher early on. Patterson is now following in her children’s artistic footsteps. She shares some space in her son’s studio/warehouse, Rene Glass, and uses the second floor of her Sacramento home as a workspace.
“It’s such a multi-step process,” she says. “The clay is the creative part, when you’re creating and carving. I disappear for hours. Then you have to deal with a different part of your brain in creating the mold, dealing with chemicals and the ratios of the elements you use to make the molds – it’s sometimes a lot of trial and error, then you pour a wax replica, then it’s off to the foundry. And sometimes that’s not the end of it. It’s all about wearing different hats. I think people don’t understand the many steps involved and the skills it takes to sculpt bronze.”
Patterson has been busy with commission work for a water reclamation plant and a public library, plus dabbling in a line of precious, patina-brushed small bronze boxes – perfect for keepsakes.
Artist Darby Patterson (left) with Zoo Director
Mary Healy, welcoming Darby’s bronze penguin
to the Sacramento Zoo.
Photograph courtesy of Darby Patterson
A few of her bronze visions are also combined with her son’s hand-blown glass, like a bronze camel lined with a red rim of glass. Animals, in fact, seem to be Patterson’s muse – but she’s not sure why.
What she does know is why she loves the process of sculpting bronze – from start to foundry to finish. “I love the smell of the bronze, the sounds of the chains clanking, the whole aura in a foundry,” says Patterson. “It’s all about that magic – alchemy – that happens when you take copper or bronze, beautiful on their own, and add a little zinc and some other chemistry. It creates something that endures time. And that’s one of the things that so attracted me.
“Glass breaks, ditto for clay,” she continues. “Bronze is as forever as I can imagine. That combined with the ancient feel of the process, the repetition of history and doing what an artisan did in a similar way thousands of years ago. How cool is that?”
Resources:
Deep in the Heart of Patridge
Jimmy Don Patridge with a copper train sculpture.Photograph courtesy of Robyn Patridge
“I had two brothers and we grew up without a father,” he recalls. “I was forced to leave high school and get a job to help support the family.” He never had the chance to attend art school and instead started working for Lone Star Sheet Metal Works in Texas doing metal fabrication. Although he worked with every metal there was, he was not allowed to even touch the copper sheet for the first six years of his employment because his boss felt that any mistakes using sheet copper would be too costly. “I did architectural copper work, mainly copper flashing, and bay window covers for residential homes,” he says.
But all of that changed after his mother passed away.
“I decided to make a copper long stem rose to put on her grave since she loved roses,” he says. “When I did that my artistic side exploded. Most everything I’ve made has been off scrap from jobsites that I turned into something beautiful. Today, he has produced more than 7,000 handmade copper roses, sculptures and copper accents for the home.
His copper pieces range from an 1870 locomotive which is nearly two feet long (and which started out as a copper roofing vent) to scale copper aircraft, Apache helicopters and other military replicas. His work also includes copper rain chains, table tops and copper jewelry. He seems nearly obsessed with working with metal. Operating out of a small shop he built in his backyard he can accommodate 10 x 4 foot copper sheet metal which is, by default, 16 gauge since that is the residential grade he collects from job sites.
Nautical copper sculpture by Jimmy Don Patridge.Photograph courtesy of Robyn Patridge
At the East Texas Fair his work has won the metal art competition for the past four years. He’s just now beginning to explore the marketing angle of being a copper artist, and will be a welcome addition to the copper arts community. Though he’s never exhibited his work at local crafts fairs or galleries, it’s a merely a matter of time before his copper work hits the mainstream.
Resources:
Copper in the Arts: EVENTS
- Palm Beach Jewelry, Art, and Antique Show
Feb 15, '13 - Feb 18, '13 - Native Expressions: Dave McGary’s Bronze Realism
Mar 7, '13 - Jun 30, '13 - Evolving Character Head Demonstration with John Coleman
Mar 9, '13 - Mar 9, '13 - More Upcoming Events...
Copper in the Arts: NEWS
New Copper and Glass Wing at UA Museum Focuses on Optical Sciences - April 05, 2011
A German-built 1800s magic lantern and kerosene lamp,
an antique precursor of today's movie industry equipment, is among the artifacts on display at the Museum of Optics.
Photograph courtesy of The College of Optical Sciences
The Museum of Optics pays tribute to the discipline's past and illustrates the history of optics, optical engineering and optical design. There are, spread throughout the building, more than 400 antique and historic telescopes, microscopes, binoculars, lenses, cameras and even opera glasses, mostly made of copper and glass.
John Grievenkamp, a professor of optical sciences at the UA for the past two decades, is the founding curator of the museum. While a number of pieces were donated, Grievenkamp procured most of the collection from online sources and dealers who specialize in antique optics.
