Marianne Hunter
ICE FAIRY DANCES 2266 pendant with gold crystal from Frenchman’s Adit Mine, Placer County, California, four enamel panels as wings, two of twenty-four karat foils over black, two of fine silver foil over white. Crystal is held in place with pegged pearls and set diamond drops of white, yellow and black, 2002. Photograph by Robert K. Liu/Ornament.
Never pass up a chance to savor beauty—there are multiplicities of exquisitely wonderful things to discover in our environment, every day. “The moment,” author Henry Miller said, “one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.” Artists like Marianne Hunter spend much of their time in this kind of world, residing as much in their imagination as the physical one surrounding them; and of which they are also a component, linking the spirit with the sensibility of human experience to the larger context of life beyond oneself.
BIRD WOMAN 2173 pendant is double-sided, with woman’s face in place of top pearl, with twenty-four and fourteen karat gold, sterling silver, abalone pearls, enamels with foils, 1999. Photograph by George Post.
Hunter’s creativity, based on her personal choices or unique preferences, draws from nature’s own extraordinary visions, replete with dragonflies, herons, hummingbirds, peacocks, swans; to the handmade filled with Byzantine icons, the luxuriant sophisticated patterns of the Japanese kimono, or simple geometric designs of a Middle Eastern kilim. They reflect her personal yearning for the insightful quest, the healing touch that dwelling in the beautiful can bring to humanity.
Her artistic activity began in the dawning of the Age of Aquarius and she progressed from amateur to professional working the local craft fairs, such as the Westwood Craft Fair, which once lined the sidewalks of Westwood Village and spilled onto the parking lots that bordered the adjacent UCLA campus. She is a true Californian, having been raised in greater Los Angeles as well as blessed with living in lovely, temperate Santa Barbara, and for nearly thirty years in the foothills of our true national cathedral, Yosemite. Lately returning to Los Angeles, Hunter managed to secure once again a natural environment of great beauty, as disparate as possible from the mountainous grandeur of Yosemite, this time overlooking the Pacific Ocean. She and her artist husband William Hunter found a home above the bluffs of Palos Verdes in an isolated, pastoral community, a historical locality, called Portuguese Bend. Here hundreds of peacocks live among the humans, trekking over the curvaceous hillsides spotted with verdant plantlife, from the carefully cultivated to the messy and freeranging. Suddenly the air cackles with the territorial male peacocks (there is one for every house located on streets named, among others, Narcissus or Cinnamon), or in auditory counterpoint the streaming, beating sound of hummingbird wings. Yet much more there is quietude, a meditative stillness, and this is calming to the anxious heart. Their home seemingly reaches for the palpable presence of the nearby ocean so kindly named. On clear, sunlit days the water sparkles, remindful of the etched markings of the finest cut diamonds, as it rolls, rises and falls between the shore line and the distant Catalina Islands. One does not resist nature or remain distinct from it in such a land.
Ten years ago, Hunter began a very special series, which came to be called Kabuki/Kachina, marking the overall influence of Japanese art on her work, but especially the kimono with its jewel-like colors, from subtle to vibrant, and its traditional use of natural forms decorating the surface. The first effort imitated the kimono, the design separated into segments in the enamel portion, with every segment a replication of part of the traditional kabuki costume. “If you knew kabuki the way we know fairy tales,” she says, “you would be able to recognize what character was being represented. Then I put a stone at the top of the kimono where a head would be. It leapt into my mind that this was a kachina, just because of the proportion. So they became Kabuki Kachina. Since that time they have morphed from culture to culture. And since I’m interested in morphing in one way or another, there is a strong Byzantine twist to some of them; there are tapestry designs from kilim patterns; there are Native Americans patterns from the different cultures.”
GOLDEN SUN DANCER 2200 necklace of enameled wings layered with twenty-four karat and .999 silver foils, natural gold crystal, diamonds and twenty-four and fourteen karat gold, natural double pearls, 2002. Photograph by Bruce Ecker.
Other changes to their conception continue to be made, sometimes depending on the turning of dramatic world events. During Desert Storm, the bombing of Baghdad in the first Gulf War, Hunter listened to the journalists reporting from their hotel. “I was working on a Kabuki Kachina piece at that time and was feeling very upset over the news. It became the first work to have hands. One hand was an open palm with a heart engraved in the palm. So you have a heart in hand, and openhandedness is a weaponless hand; the other hand holds a growing vine, as a form of staff, with a leaf at the tip, instead of what you would normally expect, a clutched fist holding a spear or other weapon.”
Hunter likes to include important personal mementos that are indicative of her customers. “I am in the process of making a piece (see Cover) that my client said a ‘gypsy would wear,’ with wild and bold colors. She liked mine, the one that I wear frequently, so I knew that it had to have similar elements and organization. She also wanted the piece to be broader in its dimension; instead of having just a tiny sleeve, which is usually more stylized and truer to the nature of a kimono. I opened the arms and they are both welcoming, by giving out and accepting in. She is a very morally strong woman; so I wanted it to be a strong piece, a comforting piece, a joyful piece.”
Incised into this newest Kabuki Kachina, one of her signature poems completes the piece—“Kabuki Kachina, dances joy into being, spinning, cloud and water, mountain and meadow, into the cloth, of heaven and earth.” The vividly designed garment flows with movement. Flowers, delicate patterning and a languid peacock feather draw the eye over the vestment, finally resting to take in the celebratory gesture of her upstretched arms sheathed within capacious sleeves, marked by airborne butterflies. Later the work went on to be completed with necklace beads that are strung in two segments so that it can be worn at two different lengths, and includes hand cut Peruvian opal, lapis, charoite, turquoise, gold and ruby with fourteen karat clasps. The enamels are applied dry/freehand in very thin layers and in specific areas. The five panels took approximately seventy-five to one hundred firings to complete. The enamels are in twenty-four karat gold and fine silver foils, and the little necklace surrounding the Kabuki Kachina is set with amethyst, moonstone and emerald. Also found on the garment are rubellite, other opals and the centerpiece of a stunningly liquid Boulder opal.
This neckpiece marks another evolution in the way Hunter goes about designing and constructing, but “that’s how it happens for me; one thing leads to another,” she states. Hunter grew up in a family that encouraged her interests always centered on the arts. “When I was dancing that was encouraged; when I was painting that was encouraged. My mother would drive me once a week to take private oil painting lessons from a woman who taught out of her home. I did that for years. I won a scholarship when I was in junior high school to the Otis Art Institute, for a summer, and that was supported. I went to UCLA Extension when I was in junior high school and had to get permission from the principal to do it; and my parents allowed me the freedom of taking a course with college students. I took the bus to Westwood and back. There I was, twelve years old, painting with college students; it was way over my head, but it was great because I wanted to be in that world.”
An accident of fate, her interest in enameling began some thirty-five years ago, when a high school boyfriend asked if she had tried enameling and how enjoyable it was. “That changed my life right there,” she emphasizes, “because I never stopped doing it from that point on. I bought one of those little trinket kilns that were $12.50 for the kit. I was completely hooked.”
AURORA WAKES THE DAWN 2230 of baroque pearl, grisaille and foil enamels, white diamond, two pink argyle diamonds, set in twenty-four and fourteen karat white, rose and yellow gold, biwa pearls, 2001. Pendant is 7.3 centimeters wide. Photograph by Robert K. Liu/Ornament.
Self taught, her classroom experience is pretty well limited to a college course. “I knew I had a great teacher but it was such a waste of time for me. I could have learned a lot, but I was too stubborn to learn anything from anybody. I remember another student who with every assignment would make incredible things, well executed, spending hours and hours on a project. And I couldn’t understand how you could be lost in creativity in a classroom situation. So I learned very little. And I have some of the scars still to show for it.”
Assembling her professional techniques and proficiencies came in phases—you have a new idea, you have a new problem, and you work through being comfortable with that. “By nature, I get bored, and it just has to become more complicated. My husband and I both believe that we are adrenaline junkies, and that if something isn’t scary, if it isn’t thrilling, it won’t hold our interest. That is one of the reasons that the work continues to progress. We have to be constantly challenged.”
Hunter especially relishes life with another artist. One of America’s most significant woodturners, William Hunter is described by his wife as an artist “of great integrity and soul, committed to what he is doing, and inventive in what he is doing.” He also encouraged Marianne to take risks and to broaden her work, “and not to hold back my artistic vision because I might be afraid that no one would buy my work. He said see what happens, and that’s what I did: Bill admires me for taking such a step and the freedom it brought me. We are both really happy to spend our days in the studios. It’s very satisfying work.” She is also grateful “to live with another artist who understands your lack of ability to schedule most things, other than your next show; also the desire one night to work until midnight, and the next night to quit at 5:30 because you are hungry and you have carpal tunnel syndrome. The intensity with which you view your work can be understood by other artists; the way you can agonize half a day over what to title a piece. Most people would find that a bit over the top, but we don’t.”
Her artistic production over the years has become relaxed and much more self assured. She exudes confidence over making a risky piece and the fact that eventually someone will come to understand it. “I have faith in the work that I am doing,” she says, “and in the meantime, I enjoy showing it to people; I enjoy thinking about it; and seeing what that leap forward represents.”
From the beginning, Hunter has been a working artist, “never having had a straight job or a paycheck.” She is a classic studio jeweler. “In every way, from buying materials to the amount of time that goes into a piece, to the subjects that I can embrace, I am self indulgent in my work.” Her work week often lasts six days. “I love what I’m doing,” Hunter states. “The only thing that I’m impatient about is that I can’t wait to see what a piece is like finished.” The average piece takes two weeks, with one week the minimum. And Hunter is content because she is making progress with every layer. She draws with a pencil, only coloring designs in order to explain them to others. They also require planning because of the precise nature of her medium. “Now, if I was doing an enamel piece that did not have other elements, a drawing wouldn’t be as important because nothing would have to mesh after the fact. But a sleeve has to be at a certain angle and it has to be a certain size. I have to know how wings are going to meet. I have to know if they are in proportion to the pearl. There are a lot of things that have to work out. This little stone has to nestle into that enamel piece just so or it isn’t going to work. So the planning stages are really important.” Hunter usually concentrates on one work at a time. Sometimes she designs three or four pieces, does the enameling for two of them; then finishes the setting of one.
PEARL-MIST DANCER 2234 of enamels over .999 silver foils, South Sea Pearl, natural diamond crystals of two pink and one blue, cultured pearls, twenty-four and fourteen karat gold setting, 2000. Necklace is of cultured pearls and twenty-two and fourteen karat gold. Dragonfly wingspan is 9.0 centimeters. Photograph by Robert K. Liu/Ornament.
The Pearl-Mist Dancer dragonfly necklace is part of a two-year cycle that goes back to 1982. She remembers this well: “I sold my first dragonfly for next to nothing because I needed airfare to get to Seattle for the first enamel symposium.” For the wings Hunter fires the black enamel first and silver foils over that. Sometime she uses the grisaille process, but in this particular piece only the foil was used, then the transparent and opalescent enamels, in layer over layer; so the effect, as the piece moves, is of color shifting as light strikes different depths. Then fineline black ink is used for the veins. When the ink is dry, she goes back with an Exacto knife and cuts half the ink away on every line to make it thinner. “Pearl-Mist Dancer is the most delicately shaded of the dragonflies I’ve made to date. Each dragonfly is very different in materials and colors than the others. I love the elegant simplicity of their forms and the exquisite complexity of their details. Creating four veined wings that accurately match is the antithesis of my nature, but required as an homage to these little living jewels.”
KABUKI KACHINA OPENS HER HEART 2299 of grisaille enamels with foils and transparent color, ametrine and opal, chalcedony carving by R. Schull, set in twenty-four karat and fourteen karat white, rose and yellow gold on sterling silver, Chinese pearls, 2002. Photograph by George Post.
A professional lifetime of working shows is an invigorating component to Hunter’s large periods of isolation in the studio. “It has been really replenishing to do shows—providing my artwork a tremendous amount of good; and as a person it has done me a tremendous amount of good. I was once painfully shy. But when I am standing behind my work, I am mostly getting nothing but praise. People sometimes get such an emotional response to a particular piece that they are beyond words; some have been moved to tears.
“And that’s a concept I think about: that of being overwhelmed. I even made a piece called Be Overwhelmed, which belongs to a really nice client. That is a kind of constant state for me; things that are beautiful overwhelm me—personal interactions overwhelm me—the state of the world overwhelms me. I filter that through my work, and that’s how I deal with the heart hurting love you feel when seeing a hummingbird outside the studio, a beautiful bird of paradise growing, or a school of dolphins going by.
“That’s how I deal with that overabundance. Some people care too much part of the time, some people care too much all the time. I don’t know how you’d finish that, but I don’t know how to deal with another’s cruelties to me, on a tiny basis, or cruelty to one another on a global basis. And I don’t know how to deal with the anger I feel over what I think are immoral acts. I write letters or make phone calls, and I do this artwork where I either escape from it into the beauty of what I am doing, or like that piece that I did during the bombing of Baghdad—I made the most powerfully peaceful thing that I could think of. I made a symbol of the power of peace and the best of humanity, and something bigger than humanity too, the force of good.”
So the quality of her life leads Hunter to a state of activism, whether it is political involvement or social, neighborly involvement or whether it is expression through her art. Her jewelry is not a political statement per se, but it is very peaceful and benevolent.
When asked how she would like to be regarded as an artist, as a person, as a citizen, as a wife, she replied, “as a person of integrity, as a person with very high moral standards. That’s more important to me than almost anything—my integrity of my relationship with my husband; my integrity of my relationship to my artwork; my integrity to my clients; my integrity as a world citizen. I feel really intensely about what I believe is good and right. I must have an overdeveloped sense of justice. I just wrote a letter to the editor and to the president of our country that terrorists can murder us, terrorists can kill the body, but some of the things that are happening in this country are detrimental to the soul of America. And of the two threats I see the second as the most to be feared. You can murder a lot of Americans and America will still be here. But if you subvert the constitution, you subvert justice and morality and fairness. Then America herself is diminished. So I think that the worst thing that anybody could accuse me of is immorality.”
Hunter believes she has a lot of longing; a longing to be good, and to have the power to make things right, from political activism to being a pain in the neck to her family and friends by always trying to fix their problems. She relates the development of the Kabuki Kachina series to this desire. They are like goddesses in their power; they are forces of nature. “I don’t see myself as a shaman. I don’t have any feelings of grandeur or that I’m more spiritually in touch than other people,” she insists. Still, with artistic creation, there is a miraculous element, as we become more aware of the luminous, radiant, though transient, beauty of our world. For that we are grateful to artists who can still arouse our senses and sensitivities by their works, clarifying our appreciation, gratitude and compassion toward life and all living beings, stimulating them to emerge more holistically from the depths of our own confused feelings.
This article was originally printed in Volume 26 No. 2, 2002/2003.
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The late Carolyn Louise Eva Benesh was Coeditor of Ornament and Patrick’s mother, Robert’s wife and dear friend. She had been fighting stage IV breast cancer these past two years. Carolyn and Robert began the magazine as the Bead Journal in 1974, with encouragement from family and friends. Their magnificent journey has been full of struggle and joy, as they documented the human tradition of wearable expression. In this issue we reprint two of her articles: from 2002/03, her article on Marianne Hunter’s enamel jewelry and from 2009, the striking clothing of Carter Smith, both of whom are masters of their respective media. Beyond that, they have forged lifelong connections with Carolyn, a small reminder of the many friendships she had made within the craft community.
