This is unmarked, except for sterling. Is there a way to ID the maker by the design? Are these geometric designs suppose to be weather related?
Thank you .
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Perhaps someone else here can identify the maker. These look like a Water Serpent motif to me.
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I would guess it would be difficult to figure out this artist from the design. I found this list online, but I didn’t do a deep dive.
I snapped a couples pics of some info in a book I have on Hopi silversmithing (sorry so small). My book does not have a list of the common symbols, but I thought this is interesting.
So what I gather from the book, is that it would be nearly impossible to have an exhaustive list of symbols.
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I would say no, if by design you mean the specific imagery as a clue to an artist. More telling are style and techniques: the overall approach to negative/positive (dark to light balance), crowding vs. spaciousness in layout, fineness vs. coarseness in the cutting of the top surface, and other elements, like whether the shank is flat vs. convex and whether the background is incised and the particular look of that incised work. Without hallmarks you are on your own, but so many artists came through the Hopi Arts and Crafts Guild/Hopi Crafts schooling.
This piece has, obviously, a very bold and dense relationship of dark to light, with strong horizontal carving of the background layer, which would lead me to search for Hopi artists with a similar hand.
In short, you can only guess.
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Very informative. thank you.
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