Image: Tommy Singer 2

Description: A simple silver bolo tie made by Navajo silversmith Tommy Singer purchased in Taos, New Mexico during the 1980's. While the silver patterns are borrowed from the Hopi pottery designs symbolizing clouds, the silversmithing technique constitutes a gloss, as the oxidized black surfaces remain unadorned, smooth, and devoid of sharp chiseled grooves, the so-called matting technique, and the silver overlay shapes (upper sheet of the two bonded silver sheets) are rounded and sloppily cut, not cut severely and precisely with metal saw applied perpendicularly to the upper sheet of silver that follows a copper template the silversmith cut ahead of time and reuses to create silver copies time and time again. The Hopi silver overlay work, in contradistinction to the Navajo Hopi-like silversmithing, features very sharp cutting of templates with sharp edges remaining throughout, the sharper the more desirable and reflecting skill. Detailed, painstaking matting fills all of the black oxidized surfaces, even those in small narrowly cut out gaps. The more matting, the more effort the silversmith has put in, and the finer is his reputation, and the more his eyesight has been taxed.
Title: Tommy Singer 2
Credit: Own work
Author: LarryStevens
Usage Terms: Public domain
License: Public domain
Attribution Required?: No