Peninsula People Feb 2018

Small, subtle, and gently magnificent
Angel wings and peacock feathers: Sketches for jewelry by Marianne Hunter
A Portuguese Bend jeweler crafts works of art and beauty
by Bondo Wyszpolski
The first sketchbook Marianne Hunter shows me dates back to 1977,
but she’s been making jewelry for half a century so perhaps there’s
an earlier sketchbook or two lying close by.
The word “exquisite” is often overused, same with the word “sensibility,”
but if there are better ways to describe the work and the person I’m sitting
down with I don’t know what they are.
Married to the equally talented and skillful woodcarver William Hunter,
Marianne may be described or defined in some circles as an artisan or
craftsperson, but what she creates is never mere handiwork. The finished
pieces, mostly pendants or brooches, are thoughtfully designed, almost storyboarded
in some cases, visual and non-visual poetry with many of them
bearing poetic titles.
Elaborate praise goes only so far. The jewelry needs to make an appearance,
the preliminary drawings as well. Her influences are many, some not
so surprising, such as the Viennese Secessionist and the French-Belgian
Symbolist styles of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, along with Art
Nouveau and in particular René Lalique.
“Lalique is my jewelry hero,” Marianne says, “because his artwork was
so finely wrought and so exquisitely detailed. And also incredibly inventive.
He used materials that nobody used before him in fine art jewelry – tortoise
shell and bone and wood. Materials that weren’t considered valuable and,
therefore, ‘No, this can’t be a part of a fine piece of jewelry.’” But the naysayers
were proved wrong, weren’t they?
In her earliest days, Marianne Hunter worked primarily in grisaille, that
is to say, in black and white, and her subject matter was curtailed in the
realms of fantasy and myth. Her husband, thankfully, nudged her out of
that self-confined way of thinking, and into new territory. “So, now I’m all
over the map,” Marianne says, “but I feel that’s the reflection of a curious
mind.”
It’s a curious mind that we are funneled into by way of her sketches.
Items were numbered, what metals were used were dutifully noted. “When
you look through these,” Marianne says, “you can start to see different areas
of development where I’ve got themes going.”
In the early years she was making about 50 pieces a year. They were small
and the smithing was relatively easy. “And then as I went on I came into
contact with so many more materials.” More choices, then, requiring more
deliberation.
And where does she find her ideas?
“The way I draw is partly whatever it is I’m thinking about at the moment.
So that comes into my work. And I’m interested in anthropology and
I’m interested in dance and I’m interested in other art forms. I really like
other cultures; and I love fantasy, all kinds of fantasy and mythology.”
There are stories with fairy tale themes as well as pendants and brooches
with African or Australian undercurrents. One prominent design that occurs
in numerous permutations are her Kabuki Kachinas, as she calls them.
“They ended up being my signature work. I can tell any kind of story in
these figures. I can go anywhere I want with them reflecting how I feel
about that. They’re everything from, really, art nouveau to very stylized
and modern.”
It took her, Marianne says, 50 years to get to Japan. “And it was everything
I imagined and more. Walking into some of the older buildings that had
been maintained, or down the street in the older towns, was like walking
into a woodcut.” The appeal is understandable. Peter Quennell called Japan
“a universe of half-tones and subtle hints.”
They speak, she listens
Sometimes a gem will remind her of something, Marianne says. In that
Hunter cont. on page 25
February 2018 • Peninsula 23