The Cape Cod Ocean Collection - How It Was Born

 I began making jewelry in 1970 and for 30 years my designs were inspired by antiquity and by the metals themselves. I was drawn to the motifs of ancient Egypt and Rome and loved the intense yellow color of the high karat gold used in the jewelry of those civilizations. Although most gold jewelry in the United States at that time was made with 14K gold, I quickly began using 18K and even 22K. (Pure gold is 24K.) Inspiration directly from nature wasn’t part of my design repertoire but, in 2002, my wife and I moved from our beautiful old home on Cape Cod’s Old Kings Highway to a house that sits at the edge of a tidal marsh and looks out to Cape Cod Bay. It was a life-changing move in every way.

In those first days of living in the new space, I had a hard time leaving to go off to work and looked forward to going home to watch the birds, the sunsets, and the constantly changing colors of the water moving in and out of one of Cape Cod’s spectacular marshes. It didn’t take long for the compelling beauty surrounding me to manifest in my designs.

One day, as I was playing with pieces of metal on my jeweler’s bench, an abstract curve rolled into a wave. I set the wave into a simple circle and it became a pendant. It was unlike anything I’d ever done because, in its own way, it was representational. That day in 2002 was the beginning of the Ocean jewelry series. That wave-like curve set in a circle soon morphed into pendants, rings, earrings and bracelets. At this point, in 2021, that simple design has been copied by many others. Some call it the Cape Cod Wave, some call it Wave jewelry. I call it the Ocean Collection because, after all, the ocean is universal. I still live on that tidal marsh and continue to be inspired by the tidal sands, starry nights, bird migrations, and natural patterns here on Cape Cod.