Exotic stones and crystals drift inside colorless quartz gems shaped like ancient amphora.

by Si & Ann Frazier,
Foreign Correspondents

Pick up one of Brian Cook's elegantly shaped rock crystal "Amphoragems" and tip it to one side, and a scattering of brightly colored, tiny crystals or bits of gem rough slowly descends through the interior, winking light at you as the pieces gently float by. The effect is mesmerizing, soothing in the effortless motion, stimulating in the curiosity it invokes. The inspiration is as odd as the ancient Greeks and as new as this decade's discovery of intensely blue tourmaline in Paraiba, Brazil. Brian Cook has been on the gem on the gem and mineral scene for the last 20-plus years, prospecting and importing materials from Brazil, exercising his considerable skills in lapidary arts, and together with his wife, Kendra Grace-Cook, running Nature's Geometry, their Graton, California, based company. Kendra is already familiar to Lapidary Journal readers for her exquisitely crafted Aromajewels (see "Fragrant Gems," March, 1998), her own gemstone vessels that function as both lovely ornaments and finely controlled scent dispensers.

Rutilated quartz vessel, two cavities stopped with garnet, containing spessartine garnet from Brazil. Arizona garnets from the Navajo Reservation, and gold nuggets from Canada.

Amphoras are those two-handled, often pointy-bottomed, earthenware jugs used by the ancient Greeks and Romans for storing oil, wine, and other fluids. The pointy tip was designed for burial in the cool ground, a natural refrigeration system that must have come in very handy in a hot climate. Cook borrowed the graceful from of the ancient amphora for his design, but intending his pieces to be pendants or earrings, he cuts miniature amphoras in n mostly very clear, rock crystal quartz as well as the occasional pale aquamarine, morganite, or other lightly hued, transparent stone.

Like the original amphoras, Cook's jewels are also hollow, but instead of storing valuable foodstuffs in his vessels, he puts brilliant bits of often quite pricey minerals into the transparent chambers. It turns out that the now very rare and always expensive Paraiba tourmaline, wildly colored blue to green by copper and manganese, inspired Cook's design in the first place.

Just a couple of years after hitting the market, the price of this material really too off. As David Federman wrote in Modern Jeweler in 1992, "Paraiba prices are as close to paranormal as gem prices get. They have defied gravity, common sense... prices threaten to break into the five digit realm. That's not just flight, that's space travel." Far outstripping the $500 a carat that any tourmaline had till then commanded, Parable was being offered for $1,000, $2,000--even $10,000 a carat!

As one of the early importers of this progress with interest that later turned to some concern. "When I first concept-conceptualized Amphoragems," Cook told us recently at his studio, "I was trying to figure out a way that would let people enjoy this remarkable gem for hundreds instead of thousands of dollars." From there, it was a small but significant leap to storing small but fine samples of very precious gems inside little gemstone vessels.

MAXIMUM IMPACT. While the contents of each vessel are bright enough to catch your notice under any circumstances, Cook's clever use of quartz containers increases the impact of these tiny bits of gemstone confetti. He shapes the clear quartz with smooth convex curves that magnify the gem pieces to varying degrees depending on the angle through which they're viewed. As a result, as you handle a vessel, the brilliant little bits appear to expand and contract before your very eyes.

Besides the sprinkling of colorful stones, Cook fills the hollowed-out chambers --some vessels have more than one--with carefully selected, clear, colorless, and quite viscous fluid, which he will describe only as a natural oil with refractive indices very close to those of quartz. The viscosity suspends the little stones inside so that they drop slowly towards the bottom, while the matching R.I.'s and color (or lack of it) of the container and fluid make the fluid virtually invisible, imparting the illusion that the colored stones are languidly floating through the limpid quartz itself.

After carving very clean rock crystal - or occasionally, quartz that shows a phantom or growth outline -- into a miniature amphora shape, Cook drills the chambers for the gem pieces with diamond drills that are 2.5, three, four, or five millimeters in diameter. He then carefully sands and polishes the inside of the cylindrical chamber just as he would the surface of a fine gem. This step in time consuming but also absolutely essential.

Cook cuts and polishes all his quartz containers, inside and out, at his remote workshop ( "so I don't have any distractions" ) in Brazil, where, as he says, he has "excellent sources for the rough material, mainly myself." He works for 10 to 12 hours straight, "often through most of the night, especially when it's unbearably hot during the day." He brings the polished vessels back to California, where the contents are selected , placed inside, and the vessel closed off.

Originally, he mounted his Amphoragems in 18-karat gold so that they could accommodate a chain or cord and be worn as a pendant. More

recently, he's been drilling the suspension hole for a chain or cord right into the neck of the amphora with just enough of a curve so that the pendant hangs well when worn. This whole is, of course, also carefully sanded with diamond pastes and polished with cerium oxide, just as the internal cavities are.

To keep the wonderful contents inside Cook "corks" the gem chamber by cutting a piece of quartz to fit smoothly into it. He carefully cements the plug in with "330 epoxy, a good, standard jeweler's epoxy available from most supply houses. It's a two-part epoxy that uses a catalyst and sets up slowly but doesn't require heat to cure." The slow setup gives him time to work with the colorless adhesive, which he describes as not brittle. After two or three days, when the epoxy has set thoroughly , he saws off part of the plug that extends beyond the vessel and polishes both surfaces to blend them.

We had to agree that the epoxy was a good choice. With our unaided eye, we could not detect the plug, although we easily could with a 10-power hand lens. Of course, this is as much a testament to Cook's careful craftsmanship as it is to chemistry, though Cook is quick to point out that he has benefited from the experience and advice of other talented lapidaries as well.

In developing their designs, he says, he and his wife consulted with Lawrance Stoller. "Both he and Glenn Lehrer were using the technique we use in creating our holes in stone," he says. "A few more of my favorites I'd like to mention who've continually blown me away are Arthur Anderson, Charels Kelly, Gil Roberts, and Kevin Lane Smith." He describes as the experience of a lifetime a visit to the studio of Manfred Wild in Krschweiler, Germany, famous for his elaborate gem creations in the tradition of Faberge.

Besides creating Amphoragems, Brian Cook imports gems and minerals from Brazil; he was instrumental in bringing the vivid blue-green tourmaline from Paraiba State to market. Here he's shown at the Paraiba mine, with the tailings in the background.

Like many of the artists he admires, Cook is largely self-taught. "My first lapidary experience was creating this sections of rock for microscopic petrography. With permission to rummage through the sample bins, I discovered labradite and became enthralled with color phenomena. At the same time my friend Allan Bloom had a set of wheels in a bone-, rock-, and cobweb-infested back-room in his Victorian manor, and many a winter night we would shape stones into the wee hours. Allan's balanced and flowing simple forms had made a lasting influence on my own style.

IT'S WHAT'S INSDIE that counts, they say, and while we'd have to say that the whole package counts in this case, it's certainly what's inside that makes Amphoragems so captivating.
the first thing we noticed when we entered Cook's northern California studio was what he called his palettes, actually clear-plastic boxes neatly divided into multiple compartments. Each compartment contained an assortment of tiny pieces of vary high quality gem materials, including some that are so rare and exotic few jewelers ever encounter them.

The very first compartment we peered into was filled with several dozen tiny crystal pieces of the most intense and vibrant blue that would put any sapphire to shame: fabulous examples of the mineral haüyne or haüynite (named after the Abbé René Just Haüy, 1743-1822, the man who is usually credited with founding the modern science of crystallography). Although haüynite of various shades is found at a number of places around the world, we've only seen gem pieces of this unraveled electric blue from a single locality: in the eject blown out of the (geologically) recent volcano that formed the picturesque lake called the Laacher See, in the Eifel District of Germany. We know from painful personal experience how long you have to crawl around on your hands and knees to find even one of these beauties.

As we turned our attention to other parts of his palette, we were amazed at the wide range of uniformly very choice, small gem pieces. In addition to the vivid Paraiba tourmaline in the electric blue, teal green, and even purple that inspired the concept of Amphoragems, we noted another blue sparkler, benitoit; some intense raspberry-red beryl from Utah; bright red and very gemmy, perfect octahedral crystals of ruby-colored spinel from Burma; green gahnite spinel and orange spessartine (garnet) from Brazil; orange hessonite (garnet) from Canada; plus a whole spectrum of other garnets: gemmy red manganotantalite (a real rarity), chrome garnets from the Navajo reservation, and the pink grossular discovered about three years ago in Mexico in bits that have to be described as hot pink.
More common gem materials, such as Colombian emeralds, abalone, Mississippi Valley, and other pearls, tourmaline, precious opal, and especially small diamonds could almost be described as anticlimactic. As quartz collectors, though, we were dazzled by a collection of just the most perfect and sparkling little quartz crystals called Herkimer "diamonds."

WHATEVER YOU LIKE. Now, how to select what goes into particular pendant or pair of earrings? Each of the vessels that Cook creates is unique, varying from its fellow Amphoragems in the precise shape of the container, sometimes its material, and the makeup of the contents. Cook says what goes inside is a very personal choice, based on innate preference, usually either his or a client's.

To illuminate the personal nature of the selection process, Cook introduced us to his smallest (in size, at least) client: his six-year-old daughter, a very charming, precocious, and self-confident young lady. Natasha Cook had picked out the stones for her own Amphorogem: a red spinel octahedral crystal, a gemmy orange spessartine garnet, a small gold nugget, and a piece of some white gem that looked vaguely like fine ivory - which turned out to be the first baby tooth she'd lost. Rather too sophisticated or expensive for a six-year-old, you think? The deal is that Mom and Dad will keep the pendant for her untill she is 15, when it will become hers to wear.

Brian assured us that clients decide what they want in a gem quickly and easily, and Kendra reports her own clients are just as quick. Having wasted eons of time on dithering customers who couldn't make up their minds in less that a millennium ourselves, we found this ease of decision-making difficult to credit - and as anyone who has ever taken a young child to a candy or an ice cream store knows, youthful decisions can be positively interminable. So we decided to ask Natasha about her choices. LJ: "Natasha, why did you choose those stones?"
Natasha: "I dunno... because they matched." LJ: "Are they your favorite colors?" Natasha: "No, I just liked them." How can you argue with that?

Natasha Cook's Amphoragem: colorless quartz top and vessel containing gold nugget, spinel crystal, orange Montana sapphire, and Natasha's first lost tooth.

We made up our own minds about what we'd like quickly as well, a benitoite, gold nugget, San Diego County pink tourmaline, and an abalone pearl. Brian raised his eyebrows slightly at this speed, but we fear he realized it wasn't due to some holistic sensitivity of ours to gems but to our unmitigated California chauvinism.

We were impressed with how beautiful, well-crafted, and individual each Amphnoragem is, but we have to admit to feeling a small stab of jealously as well. Back in the 1950s, putting opal chips or some other bit of gem inside a glycerin-filled ball was quite a fad. We, like many others put our few flakes of gold from long, cold, wet hours of gold panning into similar vials to show off our gold, there not being enough of it for much else. But for all our awareness of the pretty tacky fad and our own participation in it, it never occurred to us do anything so tasteful as creating a graceful vessel in which to suspend truly fine mineral miniatures.
At least we can claim a certain pride of parentage in this development. These fine gems obviously can count those opal-chip-filled balls as distant ancestors - but then a Pekinese can count a wolf as an ancestor, or more to the point, a Lincoln Continental is a direct descendent of a Model T.