Perhaps there is a natural fascination that we as humans are prone to having, and for certain there are many including me who find earth stones, gems and crystals captivating. Natural prisms and colored minerals compose gems that seem to glow and refract light through their unique and patterned forms, colors and opacities. I have very fond memories of inspiration involving crystals and gems as a child.
Amythst over oil Color Grid under Purple LED Aura, 2016. Digital Photograph.
Foggy memories of my youth seem to hide luminous remembrances of events as a child, returning to moments when my fascinations with shining and glittering gems seemed uniquely bright and colorful in regards to the rest of the memories. Everything else in the memories are a muddled grey, of many different hues and colors, but muted compared to the shining brilliance of my first childhood collection of stones and fossils. The color and tone of certain faceted and vibrant crystals seem to shout at me through the branches of time and memories, and the colors are unforgettable. Colors so luminous in my mind that even as I think of them now, they still feel very familiar, familiar enough that I can smell the clarity in the cool purple pool of amethyst, or the barky sheen of tiger-eye. Something is so organic yet industrial in the shape and solidarity of a gem. I have never seen a more milky wisp than one I recall inside the face of a geode, almost blissful in its hard shell, as organic as an egg and industrial as glass.
In my first years of schooling, when living in Bad Kreuznach, Germany, winter was a very exciting place to be as a child. While the plants go grey and the animals hibernate and it is cold and dark, during daylight ice and snow provided an infinite scape of prisms and colors. Every color of the visual spectrum reflects in many directions within the tiny crystals of frozen snow, and in the glitter and sparkle of the Christmas decorations, lights and ornaments of the season.
The winter markets were a festival of sights, of strange and intriguing antiques and collectables, including geodes, gems and fossils. I was small and would stretch my ankles to see all they had on the table. The thrill of seeing a crystal you never could have imagined was blissful spectacle in my youthful perspective. The cozy warm shops off the streets in Europe would hold magnificent columns of geodes with 'no touch' signs, large enough to be worthy of the Smithsonian; but when your only four feet tall, these stalagmite columns of crystal are magnificent obelisks of nature.
The churches and cathedrals house other gem-like wonders. Stained glass for the longest time was the only other form of clear and intrinsically colorful substances besides gems and crystals. (1) The latticed web of gem-like brilliance in stained glass windows creates an atmosphere unlike any others in my memories, where something was so warming in the mandalas of colors and figures, still as vibrant as the day they were created, remarkably similar to the colors of gems. But was my fascination with gems brushed onto me from the cultures around me, the other people and pasts that also shared an affinity to the prisms of stone? Or would I have found them captivating independently regardless of any impressions. Surely I would have excitedly found the Eye Witness book on Rocks and Minerals in the library, even if gems and stones hadn't impressed me prior. Each page revealed magnificent structures of never-imaginable variations of stone, all naturally formed and of different hues and opacities which formed over millions of years ago.
These bright and luminous evidences of history and beauty, which I was told as a child are found sparingly in and among caves around the vast surface of the earth; they are ancient rocks, some as old as dinosaurs and their fossils. I began to collect these gems, stones and fossils; enrapturing were these precious minerals to me, with their inherent color and sheen. It was a modest collection, unremarkable but nostalgic.
Light installation with Oil Paint, LED light and Minerals, 2016. Digital photograph triptych.
So Why do humans have a fascination with rare gems, crystals and stones, enough that we incorporate it into our spiritual, artistic, scientific, and economic lives even to this day?
Perhaps it isn't remarkable that I share this affinity towards gems, crystals, metals and stones after all; the fascination might be natural behavior for men and animals. What is it then that makes gems so alluring?
GEMS IN ART AND HISTORY
Since the dawn of man discovered stones and precious gems have been coveted. As time progressed, an abundance of gems and precious metals was a sign of wealth that only prestigious families had and passed on. Across the globe many cultures shared the value of these objects and used them in exchange for other goods in trading. As cultures developed artistic enterprise took root and men began crafting with gems and crystals. Whether it be a Buddhist statue, adorned chalice, rings and jewelry, or inlaid into foundations of temples, to be able to use such expensive materials as precious stones was a sign of artist mastery.
The gem has become a symbol in societies and art, a symbol of prestige and wealth, of power and regality. The way that gems and prisms of stone are able to captivate the viewer undoubtedly is a reason why they are so codified, and their rarity provides commodity.
Gems have often been the source of inspiration in art, and David Batchelor writes a vivid account of gems involved in the exploration of color in art in two of his books, Chromophobia (2000) and The Luminous and the Grey (2014).
He explores the idea of color, and the relation between the words we use to represent colors, and the indescribable and variable colors we see themselves. The visible light spectrum is a band of indistinguishable hues that blend from one to another, and by which colors seem to exist beyond words and descriptions; colors are indescribable explains Batchelor, then quoting Yves Klein in how "colour is enslaved by line that becomes writing." (2)
It seems Batchelor shared the same enlightenment in reading Aldous Huxley's Heaven and Hell, where he attempts to describe the visual patterns of crystalline structures that made up all the things he saw around him while under the influence of mescaline, and of which he sees has a luminous quality that goes beyond words and resembles gems. He relates the speechless-ness of gems to the experience we might have with extreme and captivating colors, and where "gems and shiny things are significant because they represent that which exists beyond the reach of language."(3)
In the past, masters of the plastic arts and painting invested in the expensive materials of oil paints, and this was because before the industrial revolution, dyes and pigments for paint were very difficult and laborious to collect and prepare. Colors like blue were gathered from deep underground veins of lapis lazuli or processed plants of indigo for example. Colors came from natural sources, not petrochemical mixing that provides us with colors today.(4)
Before modern colors, nature provided the most vivid of colors, and so it was literally rarer to see bright or vibrant colors. The human eye might then be more sensitive to strong or vivid colors, not much unlike a child who witnesses colors in a more sensual way than the aged. What was so exciting about Huxley's visual experiences with mescaline was that his perceptions of colors seem to be restored to child-like sensitivity. As he engages in these colors that appear to look like precious stones, his surroundings become mystical and "every paradise abounds in gems, or at least in gemlike objects resembling" transparent and luminous forms.(5) In his book Island, he ends a very tense and unraveling story with the main character drifting off into a time-less hallucination in ritual with the moksha-medicine, where all that was going on in his reality was forgotten as his attention becomes captivated by all that is around him.
"... he was startled by a blaze of jewelry. And what strange jewelry! Narrow slabs of emerald and topaz, of ruby and sapphire and lapis lazuli, blazing away, row above row, like so many bricks in a wall of the New Jerusalem. Then ---At the end, not in the beginning ----came the word, in the beginning were the jewels, the stained glass windows, the walls of paradise. It was only now, at long last, that the word "bookcase" presented itself for consideration."(6)
David Batchelor compared Charles Blanc's view of gems with Huxley, explaining how Blanc "describes gems as a kind of language, but a paradoxical, metaphorical and mute one, the language of the formless..." (7)
To say that gems and jewels remind us of carnal colors, or anomalies of light, or that of strange form, is maybe to say that gems remind us of the uninterrupted experiences of life before words. The word-less experience is something art does well to imitate, and is often what drives some artists to make art. They want to communicate the divine brilliance of life and existence in a similar and speech-less way that a perfectly formed crystal pays homage to beauty and science.
When gems, or glass, or crystal or ice reflect sheen of rainbow and colors, it still manages to take my breath away in some moments. Even skin can sparkle and shine, like cells of pearlescence that shimmer. When the sun shines just right through the strands of hair in front of my eyes, even the column of hair refracts shimmers of color sometimes of every hue. If white light (composed of all colors of the spectrum) is constantly bouncing off everything, it is not reasonable that you might see every color when staring at a blank wall?
In fact our very own eyes can refract rays of light, revealing beams of rainbows and colors. Our perception learns to look past these visual anomalies, but if we took more care to pay attention to them, would we see more colors in our world, with gem-like brilliance the way that child may see the world? Gem-eyed wonder.
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1. Batchelor, David, The Luminous and the Grey, (London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2014), p 41.
2. Batchelor, David, Chromophobia, (London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2000), p 77.
3. David Batchelor, Chromophobia, p 76.
4. David Batchelor, The Luminous and the Grey, p 35-38.
5. Huxley, Aldous, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1956), p 101.
6. Huxley, Aldous, Island, (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1962), p 335.
7. David Batchelor, Chromophobia, p 77.
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