I’m in New York for the weekend and stumbled across this store.  Evolution, For many hundreds to thousands of dollars you can purchase 220 million year old fossils of lizards, bugs, squirmy things, and wingy things.  I love this place.

I also discovered the Elizabeth Street Gallery, original and replica architectural ornmanentia (what is that word), ancient safes, shooting gallery mechanisms, hitching posts, architectural facades, statuary and everything else you can rarely get close to these days.   I talked to the owner Allan who along with selling the originals (I believe) has some of the work duplicated and then refitted for other purposes.  The environment was a dimly lit open studio filled (but not packed) with the original and replica items.  Most of them I believe were originals as I was given a brief tour where we talked about what he sells.   In the middle of the space sitting on a low table was a 19th century catalogue from a French fixture company.  Hundreds, thousands of engraved drawings were in this book.  I am grateful to the Allan and his staff who intially hesitated to open the book as the pages were very thin and fragile but then flipped through a couple of the images letting me look through the work and taking their time to talk to me about what they do.  Sometimes I think I expect their to be an attitude associated with such luxury, probably because there usually is.  As I’ve been working in the Jewelry field my own knowledge base has been rapidly expanding on techiques of fabrication and construction.  I think that if I had gone in here a couple of years ago I would have only had an aesthetic point of view to begin from and I would have been limited in my ability to discover more.  It was a great feeling to actually talk about and discuss the techniques in use and to some extent imagine myself doing the work rather than ‘just’ drawing the work.  The world opens more and more…