REPEATABILITY IS BORING | JACEK BARON

26 September 2019

1.99k

His favorite jewelry? The last one he’s made. And although his emotions change fast, one thing remains certain: his fascination with amber is permanent and unfading. Here is Jacek Baron, a goldsmith of extraordinary passion and endless resourcefulness, and his heartfelt story about the meanders of creative work.

They call you a pioneer of modern amber industry, so let me ask you this: does amber have any downsides?

Of course it does. It is quite fragile, soft, it wears down, and changes color to name a few for starters. As amber ages, it becomes dull and then darkens. In processing, it is so difficult to get a perfect surface. It’s much easier to procure with other precious stones because they are harder. On the other hand, amber has a certain peculiarity about it. So many things are happening inside and each and every piece is a mystery. Grinding amber can lead to great discoveries and great emotions, because you can reveal something that has been ensnared in stone for 40 or even 60 million years. It really is prehistory. When you look at amber under the magnifying glass, you can spot, for instance, a spider having struggled for its life, because the resin is all mangled around it. Once I found a chrysalis immersed in amber. It was emerging from the cocoon. There are plenty of spectacular images you can recognize in the weathering residue. I once saw Renoir’s ‘Bathing Women’. These things are unbelievable. When you take a moment instead of just mindlessly going with the flow, and you think about what you’re looking at, you can find amazing things there.

Is that where your fascination with amber came from 30 years ago?

The fascination was partially pragmatic, because amber happened to be available back then. But it also had resulted from the ability to just do whatever I wanted to with this material. It was easy to grind or polish. I could also make some very simple tools to process it. I would put L-brackets together and get very decent milling machines. This way I could easily work with amber and I could do it repetitively. It didn’t take much effort to create bracelets from twenty identical elements or even entire sets. Besides, amber allows you to experiment, produce various shapes and their bindings in metal. This way, it’s much easier to design without repeating yourself. I hate to repeat myself a few times. It bores me.

Your designs are everything but unoriginal or boring. The hallmark mechanical jewelry collection comes to mind. It premiered in 1998 and despite the years having gone by, it can still evoke strong emotions today. How did you come up with the idea of setting jewelry in motion?

I was asked to do a show with nude models in Legnica. So my first thought was that there’s something wrong with the picture. Either I feature jewelry, or I feature tits. On second thought, however, I decided that I was able to create jewelry that would undress the model. But not in the sense that she would be naked. Rather that jewelry would take something off her, reveal something. So first there was the idea of undressing, and then there was idea of how to put it into words. The premiere show opened with three models coming onto the stage dressed in garments I had made myself. A waiter enters and pours them champagne. They drink it talking to one another. At some point the waiter gets on a special bicycle that produces electricity to turn on the jewelry the models are wearing. And everything starts to move. Suddenly, panties fall off one of the models. Another one is wearing a necklace that looks like a vibrator… Everything is such a peculiarly woven tale. And that’s not even where it ends. After the performance, the girls step out and in comes a cleaning lady, in one of those flowery nylon aprons. She starts to clean up after the show. Moments later she turns on a bracelet that slowly pulls away at a thread in the apron. In the end the apron falls off and it turns out that the cleaning lady is wearing some armor: a thong and a silver bra enveloped by a chain mail. She is some kind of Valkyrie. It really was quite a show! Nobody had ever animated jewelry like that before. At the beginning all the gears were made of plexiglass, but later I remade them in amber, because someone wanted to buy it. Each gear had to be manually adjusted to another, which was not easy, because they were crooked. The idea was to allow the mechanism to go sideways to make their movement more visible. Generally speaking, it was quite difficult and took a lot of work to make a moving necklace like that. But it gave me incredible satisfaction when in the end it all worked perfectly well together.

You definitely are not short of ideas. After all, it was you who invented the Baron Cut. Tell us exactly what it is.

It is a wave cut deep into a stone, so it is not a convex cut, but a concave one. We can apply it to save a rock, which is important in case it is cracked, for example. So because I choose concavities, I am able to work all those cracks. That yields beautiful shapes. When you use yellow rocks, you get that special effect where they look as if they were made of bewitched water. It’s hard to describe it. The cut made me quite recognizable, so people who are interested in amber often come asking me to polish a few rocks for them. Sometimes they’ll even take a photo of me, so they can later prove that it’s definitely an original cut made by me.

What about your newer work? Among many pieces, you have created a very decorative collection, where amber appears in quite a luxurious edition.

This collection has been made with precious stones. There are diamonds, sapphires, no synthetics, no zirconia; plus only gold. While working on the collection, I kept thinking that amber is becoming so ridiculously expensive that it’s starting to outprice a lot of other materials. Therefore, it deserves a setting that matches the price. However, it is exactly for financial reasons that I haven’t finished it. All the models have been prepared and planned out, but I have not made them yet. However, this is not my final collection, because many things have still been left unmentioned. I am a bit insane, because a lot of things I create end up in the drawer or in a computer folder. For instance, I’ll make one piece from a given collection to see if it can be done at all, and that’s that. Done, and I forget about it. That happens most often when I just know that the market will not buy it, or will buy it for next to nothing. I don’t get why I should sell something for a song, when I have worked very hard. Especially if I am convinced that it is unique and simply worthy. The discount-store society is unable to appreciate anything that is different. Their only question is: how much. That’s not what it’s about.

So what is important to you in creative work?

The most important thing is being satisfied with what you do. It is also important to me that what I do is unique. That it is mine and that I have not seen it before. I don’t look at jewelry anywhere, because if I see something, I could copy it, even completely unintentionally, because it may seem to me that I have dreamed it. So I just prefer not to follow the latest trends. I don’t check out the Internet at all to keep up with them. I literally know nothing.

Where do you get your inspiration from?

I’ve learned to seek inspiration in everything. It virtually grows on trees. It’s between books, on shelves, it falls from the sky, it waits in the streets. Inspiration is a simple thing to me. My problem is with finding the time to bring all those ideas to life. Fortunately, I have a 3D design tool. This way, I can tackle more things than if I had to do everything manually. That would take me weeks. Instead, thanks to the computer I am able to draw it in 1-2 days. Dreams often bring new inspirations to me. When something comes to me in a dream, I can’t focus on anything else until I first work it out. Then only can I move on. Because if I don’t carry it out, it will keep coming back to me in a dream over and over again, or it will haunt me. Then I start talking to myself. I start doing various bizarre things. I start waking up sweating, because in those dreams I work my tail off. I just have to get that dreamed thing done.

And which of your works is unique to you?

Every latest one. But only for a few days, because afterwards I stop liking it. It’s because I have been robbed of my designs so many times. They have served as inspiration to many, and more often than not the inspiration was quite literal. People would steal my designs a great deal, so I didn’t show anything for years. I created tons of things familiar only to those who bought them from me. There are perhaps only three people in the entire world who have seem my entire spectrum: my two sons and my wife. As a rule, I work in secret, because I am very protective of my ideas. I believe, for example, that you can steal money from someone, although naturally I condemn it. Having said that, if someone steals money from me, I will forget about it in a week’s time. But I can’t stand thieves who steal my thoughts from me. That is unforgiveable. Presenting my works or setting up a website are both acts of incredible courage to me.

Talk about the customer. What is the perfect, dream client to you?

I’ve had an ideal client in New York. Whenever he ordered jewelry, he’d simply say: ‘Jacek, send over what you got. Send whatever you want as long as there is at least one brand new thing in each package.’ And so, there was. Each such package contained curiosities and novelties. That was the perfect client to me. A perfect client is also someone who comes to me and orders individually for himself or for the wife. I carry it out for him, and the man then says that this is exactly what he needed. That is the peak of satisfaction to me, whether I’ve earned in the process or not; whether I’ve sweated over it or not. Usually, I complicate my own job. For example, you come to me, say what you want, and I start pondering it; I rack my brains, even if I know it will be difficult. I know that you would prefer something in yellow gold, but I propose a two-color design, although I know that it will just give me extra work, soldering, two casts to do. But I always opt for the most difficult path so that in the end you can say, ‘Yes, you were right, this is perfect.’ That makes me the happiest and I really couldn’t care less about all the money in this world.