By Marlene A. Prost

There are familiar names and first-time entries among the winners of our third annual Gemmys competition, including some veteran artists who are showing versatile new sides of their talent. The field of entries provided some tough competition, making the judges’ job difficult. Colored Stone and Lapidary Journal congratulate them all.

This year, artists submitted their achievements in five categories: Faceted Gems, Cabochon Gems, Specially Cut Gems, Gem Objects, and Man-Made Gem Materials. This year’s judges were jewelry designer Gordon D. Aatlo, conceptual gem artist John Nels Hatleberg, and gemstone journalist and photographer Robert Weldon of the Gemological Institute of America (GIA).

Howard Friedler

Best of Competition First Place - Gem Objects

Pixies and Fairies Turning Water into Wine click on image to enlarge

Howard Friedler wanted to carve something so complicated no one else would attempt it — and he succeeded with his tour-de-force gem statue, Pixies and Fairies Turning Water into Wine. The internal sculpture was carved from one 1,719-ct. Ukrainian bicolored topaz crystal, with a 19.5-ct. Bolivian ametrine inlaid goblet and a Yukon jade base of 950 cts.

His first challenge was cleaving the kilo-plus topaz, which he bought in Tucson from a Ukrainian miner. “Cleaving the topaz rather than cutting it was critical to this project’s conception,” said Friedler, of Fantasy Gems in Lake Oswego, Oregon. “Topaz has cleavage and can lock back again. I’m able to just chisel, give a few thumps, and cleave it in slices. . . . By orienting it in a parallel plane and giving it a tap with a hammer, it split like a knife through butter.”

The topaz fell into six pieces. Parts of each of the 11 pixies and two fairies were carved in intaglio and reverse intaglio into varying sheets. “The six pieces of topaz had to be assembled to study how to work the design, disassembled for cutting of each piece, cleaned of cuttings, rinsed with clean water to remove surface particles, and well dried before reassembling to see how the cuttings looked in relation to what was happening with the other stones — and then repeated thousands of times,” Friedler explained.

When stress fractures created voids, he incorporated them into the design, like the stream of poured wine. He was delighted to find a Bolivian ametrine with both citrine and amethyst hues to “fill” the wine goblet.

With experience sculpting 300- to 500-pound stones, Friedler specializes in fantastic gem objects. He is known for his Hollowgraphics process for deep internal sculpting. Last year he won a Gemmy for The Aquatic Tower, a Brazilian optical quartz that portrayed sea creatures in 3D.

“I like when the carving has three dimensionality, when relative pieces interplay,” he said. “As you change the angle, the interplay of the pixies and fairies and wine reflections keeps changing.”

Darryl Alexander

Second Place - Gem Objects

Bumbule Upagus click on image to enlarge

It’s not often that Dr. Seuss is cited as the inspiration for a gem carving, but Darryl Alexander of Alexanders Jewelers in Gilbert, Arizona, says the beloved author inspired his winning piece, Bumbule Upagus, a whimsical bumblebee-slash-elephant creature carved out of absolute black jade.

Alexander has built a reputation as a pearl carver and jewelry designer; he has won numerous awards in the American Pearl Co. design competition. Self-taught, he began doing custom designs, was formally trained in jewelry design, and began cutting gemstones 10 years ago. His mentor in faceting is Bernd Munsteiner, his teacher at the Revere Academy of Jewelry Arts.

Alexander has always been fascinated with collectible art objects by European masters like Fabergé, and decided to attempt figurative art with an imaginative character, as opposed to German-style naturalistic carving.

Bumbule Upagus was inspired by the black carpenter bees common to Arizona. “Unfortunately, one sacrificed its life for this bumblebee idea. I took the naturalistic form from the bee and an elephant. I wanted to do something whimsical.” The name is a tip of the hat to Dr. Seuss.

Alexander chose jade as a striking material that would show detail. The creature’s head, complete with an elephant’s trunk and highly polished eyes, is carved from a solid piece of Arizona black jade that shows the little fine hairs. The body is chrysoprase with wings of rutilated quartz; the matte tail is black jade with an inset opal “for some color to make it more whimsical.” The stand is yellow agate and copper, with three “peanuts” of fossilized ivory. The three-inch-long, 135-ct. statue was carved with diamond burrs. “You start with a block. Carving the head and nose out of one piece, you waste a lot of material,” he said. “All the pieces notch into one another. The work is really intricate.” Alexander has ideas for a series of six other collectible fantastical creatures, including a dinosaur emerging from an egg and a Mothasaurus: a creature with the eyes of a snail, head of a moth, and tail of a wasp.

Richard P. Homer

First Place - Faceted Gems

Hexigonal Satin Snowflake™ click on image to enlarge

Richard Homer wanted to prove something when he entered Hexagonal Satin Snowflake™ in this year’s Gemmys competition. The acknowledged pioneer in concave faceting wanted to show the world his skill in flat faceting.

Homer, owner of Gems By Design Inc. in Kent, Ohio, has been cutting gems for 30 years. He earned a bachelor’s degree in geology from Kent State University and a graduate gemologist diploma in residence from the GIA, where he now teaches.

He has pioneered the concave cut since 1980 and has won at least 15 Cutting Edge awards with concave faceting. He won the Gemmys’ Best in Show in 2003 for his concave Celtic knot cut in rose quartz, and was a judge the following year.

But he has also perfected a flat-faceted snowflake design, showcased in his winning piece, Hexagonal Satin Snowflake. “My real reason for submitting this was, though I’ve been doing this design for 15 years, it’s overlooked by my clients and my peers. It was a good opportunity to show I’m not a one-trick pony.”

Hexagonal Satin Snowflake is a 15.22-ct. colorless topaz from Brazil, cut with traditional flat faceting and micro-etching of the flat facets. Homer’s goal was to capture the intricacy of the hexagonal snowflake. “Snow is colorless,” so topaz was a perfect choice.

“This gem has the perfect set of pavilion and crown faces, cut with mutual harmony to permit the satin-finished crown design to reflect back into the pavilion facets and then back again through the table to the viewer with the unmistakable pattern of a snowflake,” said Homer. The frosted facets on the crown are microfacets left unpolished and are hundredths of a degree in rotation.

“The real magic of the design is the harmony of the pavilion angles with the crown angles. That’s a function o fhow the light interacts. . . . It pops and winks at you, just like a snowflake.”

Right now, Hexagonal Satin Snowflake is in his safe. “I may keep it as an heirloom for my nine-year-old daughter,” who is already following in her father’s footsteps. “She’s faceted three stones already.”

Dalan Hargrave

Second Place - Faceted Gems

Barion Emerald Cut click on image to enlarge

Dalan Hargrave of GemStarz in Spring Branch, Texas, threw down a challenge to himself when he selected a “very poorly cut and windowed natural aquamarine” he had acquired in Tucson and transformed it into his winning piece, Barion Emerald Cut.

“I redesigned the stone and cut it to add a substantial brilliance to the stone . . . by using specific angles to increase the light return. The stone has an average of 86 percent light return, even with 10 percent tilt,” Hargrave said. “This is exceptionally clean for such a large [102-ct.] stone.”

Hargrave used straight-forward flat faceting, a cutting technique he designed specifically for this stone. The biggest challenge was “to design a cut that would maintain as much carat weight as possible, but not sacrifice light return.”

Last year, Hargrave won the Best of Show Gemmy with Super Nova, an Oregon sunstone cut with his signature “spirographic” cut, a technique often used in cutting crystalware but relatively new in gemstones.

Hargrave has won almost 20 AGTA Cutting Edge and Spectrum awards. In 2004, he was inducted into the National Rockhound/Lapidary Hall of Fame in the area of metal craft. He often gives lectures and demonstrations in venues like the International Opal Jewellery Design Association, the GIA lecture series, Kraftwerks, Austin Gem and Mineral Society, and San Antonio Gem and Mineral Society.

Phill Mason

Second Place - Faceted Gems

The Conception of Color click on image to enlarge

Australian goldsmith and jewelry designer Phill Mason keeps his hand in every step of jewelry making: He sources his rough, imports it, facets the gems (often with his own designs), hand fabricates it, and sets his own stones. He and his son, Tyrus, even work in front of the public in an open studio in Hobart, Tasmania.

So it was inevitable that he would teach himself gem faceting as well. “I wanted to take an increasingly holistic approach to jewelry; i.e., I aimed to master each of the jeweler’s arts needed to make a piece.”

And master it, he has. His winning piece, The Conception of Color — a 4.76-ct., dark crystal opal from Lightning Ridge — is the first opal he has ever faceted. Opal was a natural choice: His last four awards have been for opal cabochons in the Opal Jewellery Design Awards of Australia.

The Conception of Color is an ovoid form cut entirely in the round with 352 triangular facets in 22 courses to display the red, green, blue, and violet play of color. The symmetrical shape is modeled on the emu egg. “The allusion is that color has been conceived and is being incubated. Who knows what would hatch from the conception of color?”

Mason’s tool of choice is the Imahashi faceting machine. “I prefer this system because of its phenomenal engineering and better design principle, which is based more on the diamond cutter’s lap . . . I like the way I can just pick up the handpiece and walk away from the machine, even out into the sunlight if I wish.” He controlled the cutting of the soft material by using only the finer grade laps and cutting slowly.

Most lapidaries are reluctant to tackle opals because of the weight loss and tend to cut “many awkwardly-shaped cabochons from fine material. I call this the ‘random fat rounded triangle’ effect.” These shapes are difficult to set, he said. “They are frequently facilitated into jewels via wax modeling and then casting. The unfortunate result is that such pieces often have the look of having been made in the ’70s.”

Tom Munsteiner

First Place - Specially Cut Gems

Jutta click on image to enlarge

The Munsteiner dynasty is legendary in the gem carving industry. Scion Tom Munsteiner, 37, is a frequent presence in the Gemmy competition: He won four awards last year and two this year.

But Americans may not be as familiar with another talented member of this generation of Munsteiners — Tom’s wife, Jutta. A goldsmith and jewelry designer, she works in the family’s atelier in Stipshausen, Germany. She often sets her husband’s carved gemstones and has been described as his creative foil.

Now, her name has gone down into the Gemmys record books with Munsteiner’s winning aquamarine, Jutta, the significance of which, he says, is that he carved it for his wife.

Cut in a roughly 32 mm by 30 mm square, the natural blue-green stone is from Minas Gerais in Brazil and weighs 144.8 cts. Munsteiner says he doesn’t have a special affinity toward any particular gem: “I love all of our gemstones, because they’re natural and more than 230 million years old.”

Last year, Munsteiner won a Gemmy with his Magic Eye, a cabochon design that he has been working with since the ’90s. The Jutta design is a special variation on that cut, he says. “The technique is for us not new. Of course it is our trademark technique. In the U.S., they all call it the Munsteiner cut technique.”

John Dyer

Second Place - Specially Cut Gems

ZigZag™ Cut click on image to enlarge

John Dyer of Precious Gemstones Co., Eau Claire, Wisconsin, has a reputation as a wunderkind. Almost 28, he has already won 17 AGTA Cutting Edge awards — and is the only gem cutter to sweep the Faceting category in two separate years.

His winning ZigZag™ Cut, a green Afghan tourmaline, is his first-ever Gemmy entry. It combines flat faceting and his trademarked Z groove.

Home-schooled, Dyer taught himself about gemstones. He was exposed to the business end while living in Brazil with his missionary family. He recalls an eye-opening emerald buying trip to Zimbabwe with his father and partner, David. Because Zimbabwe has a very small cutting industry, gems are cut elsewhere, imported back, and sold at exorbitant prices to tourists. So the Dyers decided to buy their own rough. “We were referred to a cutter. We went into debt. He overcharged us, and he did a lousy [job]. My father says, ‘We’ve done lots of things in our lives. We can do this better.’ ” The Dyers bought faceting machines and got into the cutting business.

The tourmaline for ZigZag™ Cut came from an Afghan dealer in exchange for cutting some rough. Dyer was struck by the color and clarity of the green tourmaline, since so much tourmaline has an undertone of gray or black.

“Tourmaline is one of my favorite materials because sometimes you can get a nice-sized material,” he said; the finished stone weighs 10.36 cts. and is 23 mm long. Dyer’s goal was “to best utilize the shape of a relatively flat rough relative to the width.” The crown and sides were flat faceted with an Ultra Tech machine, but “I had to do something to make it sparkle, which is why the Z groove came into play.” The Z grooves were cut on the bottom with a variety of techniques to act like a series of miniature culets, “almost like many little pavilions.”

“In traditional faceting, if you go below a certain critical angle, the light passes right through. I managed to maintain a critical angle with each Z groove,” said Dyer.

Matt Casteen

Second Place - Specially Cut Gems

Stellar Garden click on image to enlarge

Matt Casteen of Raleigh, North Carolina, had always been fascinated by stones. But he didn’t start carving until his early 30s, when a friend suggested he take a faceting class at the Craft Center on the North Carolina State University campus. Today, Casteen teaches the course.

“I’m just getting started,” said Casteen, 39. “My story is like everybody else’s — since I was a little kid I’ve been interested in stones. My Dad got me into it.” Casteen has already won a first-place Cutting Edge award in 2004 for a suite of pink and blue-green tourmalines, but this was his first Gemmys entry. His winning piece, Stellar Garden, is a convex-cut suite of three citrines and an amethyst. He is also looking forward to his first online gallery of his work on Wright’s Rock Shop.

Stellar Garden is a meditation on cut and color. The four gemstones were cut on a faceting machine, hand-carved to fit together, then glued to show how they should be set in jewelry.

“I wanted to use larger pieces, and I knew I could find larger pieces in the quartz family. I wanted the design to come through in a bigger stone,” said Casteen. The final piece weighs 64.2 cts. and is 52 mm long. “I was trying to show variations of the color. I went out of my way to choose the golden yellow citrine on the right. I was originally going to use the golden as the centerpiece, but went with the orange [from Uruguay] because it was bigger. I wanted it to have variation.” Each stone is “puzzled” to fit together. He completed the suite of quartz by adding the amethyst so it “would look better aesthetically.”

The name is a family affair. His mother, a gardener, thought the suite looked like a garden of flowers, while his brother said it looked like it came from outer space. “ He couldn’t put his finger on it. It reminds me of nebulas in deep space.”

Tom Munsteiner

First Place - Cabochon Gems
Imagination click on images to enlarge

Tom Munsteiner learned lapidary stone cutting at the feet of a great gem-cutting master — his father, Bernd.

“It is my profession to cut gemstones, which I learned from the ground up,” said Munsteiner. He studied gemology and jewelry design in Idar-Oberstein, received a master of gem cutting degree in 1995, and has had an atelier in Stipshausen, Germany, since 1997. In the past 15 years, he has won many awards in Germany and the United States, including first place in the 2001 German Jewelry and Precious Stone Design competition in Idar-Oberstein, several first place Cutting Edge and Spectrum awards, and four Gemmys last year, including three first-place awards.

For the second year, he has won first place in cabochon carving, this time with Imagination, a natural “Paraíba” green tourmaline that measures 23 mm by 21 mm. The 34.25-ct. stone comes from Mozambique.

Munsteiner said he employed a new cut in carving this tourmaline. What is significant in the Imagination cut, he said, “is the combination of the cabochon and total reflection cut.”

Dalan Hargrave

Second Place - Cabochon Gems

Symmetry click on image to enlarge

Dalan Hargrave found a perfect specimen of symmetry in a naturally forming ametrine from the Anahi mine in Bolivia.

“The stone displays an absolutely perfect pattern unique to the formation of ametrine of the Anahi mine,” said Hargrave of Spring Branch, Texas. Hargrave’s winning piece, Symmetry, showcases the 37-ct. ametrine, carved in a standard cabochon shape measuring 22 mm by 19 mm.

“This is a rare cross section of naturally occurring, gemgrade ametrine. The most unusual characteristic of this cab is that the color separation is near-perfectly balanced symmetry,” Hargrave said.

The key to the carving is the backing of mother of pearl. “The goal would be to showcase the pattern and add a little iridescent look to the gem by backing it with mother of pearl. . . . This is a fairly standard practice today.”

Hargrave began his career as a goldsmith in 1976 as a student at San Antonio Junior College. He became a jewelry repairman, then worked in light manufacturing, mold making, and one-of-a-kind jewelry. He began cutting gemstones in 1998 after attending his first Tucson show and now operates GemStarz in Bulverde, Texas, a custom design studio specializing in custom mountings and gemstone cutting.

Rick Stinson

First Place - Man-Made Gem Materials

Amitahba click on image to enlarge

Carving his winning statue, Amitahba, a Czochralski ruby statue of the Buddha on a throne, became a spiritual journey for Rick Stinson of Stinson’s Gemcutting Inc. in Wichita, Kansas.

The journey began when an Australian woman commissioned him to carve a statue of the Amitahba Buddha to be presented to the Buddhist teacher Sogyal Rinpoche at the Lerab Ling Temple in France last August.

Not being Buddhist, Stinson dove into research on Tibetan symbolism. First, he chose to use lab-grown Czochralski ruby with a natural diamond accent. Red is the color of the Amitahba Buddha, but a mined ruby this large would have been prohibitively expensive. “Even with an unlimited budget, there is no natural crystal of this quality in existence that I know of. . . . It is without internal flaws.” The 41.36-ct. statue, carved down from a 110-ct. piece of rough, measures 14.73 x 24.12 x 11.87 mm.

Every detail represents a symbol: The diamond-tipped crown represents the traditional lamp and is carved in a peacock feather design, representing the Amitahba’s animal. The begging bowl, a pendant design based on a lotus seed pod, and abstract goldfish earrings are all symbolic. The back of the throne has an intaglio wreath of fire and three spheres that represent the three jewels of Buddhism. The sides of the throne are carved with a symbolic rope design.

The hardness of ruby, combined with the small size and large amount of detail, “made this quite a challenge,” said Stinson, who has won three previous Gemmys.

Many of his diamond burrs were too large, so he kept making smaller diamond tools. He used a high-speed micromotor for detail and polishing. “It really gave me a lot of hand/wrist freedom that I’ve not had with a flex shaft. In addition, I made a very basic platform jig from 1/2-inch aluminum plate that spanned my carving sink. Then I covered it with a plastic fabric cloth in order to help keep the diamond grit cleaned up when changing grits.” He also used mineral tack on the platform to secure the piece and rested his hand frequently to keep it from being numbed by the tool’s vibration.

January/February 2007 • Australian Minerals: A Labor of Love • The Gemmys • News & Updates • In This Issue • Visit the Tucson Show Guide