Wolfgang Vaatz Volume 44.3
INSPIRED BY CRATER LAKE PENDANT of eighteen karat gold sheet on sterling silver with 3.3 millimeter diamond, fourteen karat white, rose and yellow gold; fused. Scene is carved, engraved and deliberately textured, 3.0 x 3.2 x 0.5 centimeters, 2023. All photographs by Kerstin Wiederhold except where noted. Background photograph by John Jennings.
WOLFGANG VAATZ, 2021.
The ancient Greek courtesan Phryne is said to have won acquittal in a trial for a capital offense after her defender, the orator Hypereides, tore away her clothing in front of the jury, denouncing as blasphemous any thought of killing what the gods had made so beautiful. The story is apocryphal, but the assertion that beauty can be a saving grace when rational argument falls on deaf ears suggests that art—which, for much of its world history, has been a purveyor of beauty—has the power to persuade when reason fails. That idea is relevant to the recent work of Arizona artist Wolfgang Vaatz, who has long been an advocate for the preservation of the natural environment but is convinced that using art to emphasize human threats to nature is ineffective, even as anthropogenic climate change works its progressive catastrophe on the biosphere. “You see moving art about our situation,” he says, “but it doesn’t really offer any solutions. It’s just a statement. For me, this is too little. I leave this out of my jewelry because I want to show that nature, what we have to preserve, is beautiful. To become a steward you need to become involved. I want the viewer to be attached to the fact that trees are beautiful, and we need them.”
This strategy of persuasion, implicit in the paintings and sculpture that Vaatz has produced for decades, gained in relevance over the past dozen years as his efforts shifted primarily to jewelry, which initially incorporated bits of nature in the form of stones and now offers glimpses into miniature landscapes. The intimacy of a bracelet or a pendant, touching the skin, whispering to the ear as it moves, gives it subtler and more continuous opportunity to work on the mind than more physically detached forms of art. “They are very personal objects,” Vaatz observes. “Being connected to nature is what it’s all about: connecting the viewer, the wearer, personally. It’s a much stronger argument when you yourself understand you need to do something, that you have a stake in the issue. Then you can find a way to solve it.”
Vaatz’s own experience demonstrates that beauty indeed has a way of making connections and influencing behavior. Experiments that would eventually lead to his production of jewelry were prompted by a visit to the 2011 Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, where the “amazing colors and amazing patterns” were so seductive that he found himself plunging into lapidary work with little more than intuition to guide him. After discovering and joining a local lapidary club and learning fundamental techniques, he dedicated more time to working with gemstones alongside painting and sculpture. “At first I was cutting stones, but I had no idea what to do with them,” he confesses. “They were hard to sell. They were sculptural shapes. Then around 2012 I got a bit more serious. I did my first silver bezel and had my first piece that I could put on the market.”
While some of Vaatz’s work still incorporates gemstones as a means of injecting color into compositions and exploiting the refraction of light, his current jewelry is composed primarily of precious metals worked in a variety of techniques. Among his active series are three that present the beauty of nature in distinctly different depths of field. The Aspen Collection focuses on sections of trunks, branches and leaves; the Quaking Aspens Collection zooms in to examine the delicate structural relationship between leaves, petioles and twigs; and the Landscape Collection zooms out to situate trees in the larger natural environment of which they are vital components. Together the collections offer a commentary on interconnection, suggesting that the idiom of not seeing the forest for the trees (or its converse, not seeing the trees for the forest) plays on a false dichotomy. The forest is the trees and the trees are the forest. The mind creates a separation where the eye sees none. Vaatz looks from leaves and twigs to branches and trunks and from branches and trunks to trees in a landscape in a seamless process of connection in which beauty is a constant.
INSPIRED BY DUCK CREEK PENDANT of eighteen karat gold sheet on sterling silver with fourteen karat white gold, 4.0 millimeter diamond; fused, carved, engraved, and textured, 6.7 x 2.3 x 0.6 centimeters, 2022.
The theme of coalescence of the many and the one is incorporated naturally into Vaatz’s Aspen Collection through its subject matter. A stand of aspens, aptly called a clonal colony, has the distinction of being a single organism connected by an extensive underground rhizome. Each tree, growing as a lateral shoot from the rhizome, is a distinct individual in terms of its height, leaves, bark patterns, structure of branches, and other features, but its DNA is identical to that of all others in the stand. Single trees sprout and die away, but the organism lives on, the oldest known example being a Utah colony thought to have been standing for the past 80,000 years.
Of the many analogies that could be drawn from the genetic unity of visually distinct aspen trees and the longevity of the larger organism of which they are parts, the one Vaatz finds most relevant concerns humanity. “There are no two trees alike,” he notes, “but they are still one family. So it’s a bit like a society: genetically similar, but each person can be an individual. The only difference is that aspens stick together and help each other. It looks like that’s slipping out of our societies everywhere.”
That loss is, of course, bad news for more than aspens, on which anthropogenic climate change has inflicted a phenomenon known as Sudden Aspen Decline or SAD. The condition has resulted in huge losses of aspen colonies, particularly in Southeastern Colorado and northern Arizona. Drought leads to overgrazing as grasses die and deer and elk are driven to young aspen shoots as a food source, but more worrying than damage to the shoots is the vulnerability of the rhizomes to desiccation. The loss of individual trees is tragic but each death of a millennia-old aspen rhizome leaves an eternal stain on the record of humanity. As we near the fateful 1.5-C climate threshold, the days of aspens, like so many other species of flora and fauna, may be numbered. It is not encouraging to know that such a fate can be potentially averted only by the cooperation of human beings, but if aspens have hope of survival, that may well lie, as Vaatz suggests, in the persuasive power of their beauty.
And aspen stands are famously beautiful, especially when the leaves turn color in the fall and gusts of mountain air set them “quaking” like the myriad fluttering wings of a kaleidoscope of butterflies. Ironically, this picturesque shimmering effect is the reason that Vaatz has never painted landscapes of aspens. “They’re very aesthetic trees,” he admits. “To an artist they’re wonderful, and everybody paints them here in the West. But in a painting I always try to give a story of what’s really happening. I never painted aspens because when you’re in an aspen grove and the wind goes through it, the way that the light gets manipulated and reflected—how it changes this whole environment—is not paintable.”
The problem, as Vaatz, sees it, is that a painting, regardless of the artist’s expertise at mimicking the effects of shifting light, remains a stationary object. An alternative means of representing aspen leaves in motion only suggested itself to him after a fortuitous association made at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, where a vendor was pouring out a glittering measure of placer gold flakes: tiny bits of gold found through minimally invasive practices in the alluvial deposits of California streambeds. “I said, ‘Wow, they fall like aspen leaves,’ ” he recalls. “The movement of the gold flakes gave me the idea. Jewelry is not fixed; it’s moving. You can create an action of the leaves.”
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QUAKING ASPENS CUFF of eighteen karat gold sheet on sterling silver, 10.0 millimeter peridot; oxidized, 5.7 x 6.5 x 5.0 centimeters, 2022.
Images on the jewelry of the Aspen Collection are scaled to the size of the placer gold, which is fused to the surfaces in a technique that Vaatz perfected through trial and error after being informed by an experienced goldsmith that it couldn’t be done. (“I’m a late teenager,” Vaatz jokes.) In those examples from the collection in which each flake represents a single aspen leaf rather than a cluster, the surface of a brooch, pendant, bracelet, or other piece of jewelry is only large enough to accommodate depiction of a section of trunks and branches. In these works, the effects of light are perhaps most dramatic, but in all of the jewelry of the Aspen Collection the golden leaves contrast brilliantly with Argentium silver or fourteen karat white-gold branches and trunks, and dark backgrounds. The forms of the trees are intricately carved, then accented by oxidation to create the distinctive look of white aspen bark and its characteristic black lateral scarring.
The compositions of the Aspen Collection, essentially bas reliefs, rely on Vaatz’s experience with painting as much as on the techniques that he has developed specifically as a jeweler. The Quaking Aspens Collection, however, draws the eye much closer to the physical details of aspens and more obviously relies on Vaatz’s experience with sculpture in the round. The leaves, rather than being represented in pictorial compositions, inhabit real space.
Cut from sheet gold by the hundreds—a tedious process in which Vaatz has often relied on the assistance of his wife Kerstin, and his daughter Katja and son Frederick—the leaves reflect some fifty different templates made from the outlines of actual leaves that Vaatz has photographed. The sheet-gold versions are individually engraved with veining then laser-welded to thin silver wires that imitate the unique flexible petioles that account for the effect of aspens trembling in a breeze. The silver petioles are then welded to twigs cast in silver in molds taken from actual examples. The naturalistic effect of the twigs, petioles and leaves conjures a fragile beauty that is often augmented by inset gemstones: nods to Vaatz’s background as a coloristic painter. Rather than imitating raindrops or beads of dew illusionistically, these stones make analogies to liquid through the refraction of light.
Gemstones are also active in the jewelry of Vaatz’s Landscapes Collection, in which they play the role of an inset sun radiating its light onto minutely detailed microcosms of trees, mountains and shimmering streams. Consistent with Vaatz’s other collections in terms of the rhetorical function of beauty and the centrality of nature, the Landscapes, as their title implies, shift to a more expansive perspective. “You see a lot of nature-inspired jewelry,” Vaatz points out, ”but it’s often missing the broader context, the horizon. That’s where the landscape comes in. You’re not just looking at the flower or the leaf. You need to have the context where everything works together on this planet. You have to have the sun; you have to have the sky; you have to have the moisture in the clouds. Water is extremely important, so I work with a lot of water scenes. When you move, the water creates different reflections. Everything is in movement.”
Movement is an essential link between nature and the heart of Vaatz’s jewelry—its ability to convey the “story of what’s really happening” in the beauty of sunlight, the stirring of leaves and the rippling of water—but it also serves as a metaphor for processes that unite nature and humanity, neither of which is a fixed entity. The transformative impacts of humanity on nature are not discrete events of cause and effect, but rather feedback loops in which effects become causes for new effects in a dialectic of change that, as it hurtles toward devastating consequences, threatens to spiral irrecoverably out of control. For Vaatz, the beauty of nature is vital to triggering corrective action, because experiencing beauty lays the persuasive groundwork for an all-important perception of connection on a grand scale. “Like the Aspen groves,” he asserts, “everything is interconnected. The whole planet is basically a big aspen grove, and we just sometimes don’t get it.”
ASPEN DUET CUFF IN TURNING COLORS FROM GREEN TO RED of Argentium silver, twenty-two to twenty-three and a half karat placer yellow gold, tsavorite garnet, orange sapphire, 4.1 x 5.2 x 2.4 centimeters, 2023. AGTA Spectrum Awards 2nd Place Winner in Business, Day Wear Category.
IMAGINARY FLOAT TRIP ON THE SNAKE RIVER CUFF of eighteen karat gold sheet on sterling silver with fourteen karat white, rose and yellow gold, 5.0 millimeter diamond; fused, carved, engraved, and textured, 5.3 x 6.3 x 4.0 centimeters, 2024.
Glen R. Brown is a professor of art history at Kansas State University, and a regular contributor to Ornament. As an apprehensive observer of the effects of climate change, he was drawn to Wolfgang Vaatz’s strategy of addressing unprecedented threats to the biosphere through the beauty of his jewelry. “In representing the elegance and fragility of aspens to provoke emotional investment in their survival,” Brown says, “he revives the classical use of beauty as a means of capturing the viewer’s attention and from there building empathy. Where the ominous clouds of climate change still provoke too little response, maybe sunlight has a chance.”
