“A Delicate Balance” by Lisa Hawthorne won first place in the “Jewelry: Silver with Stones” category of the 2007 NICHE competition. Contributed Photos

From the deck of her home in the Coquille Valley, artist Lisa Hawthorne has an uninterrupted view of pastoral beauty. Forested hills drop steeply to the pasture lands below, and she can watch the play of light on water as the river winds slowly toward the Pacific. Just downstream, a herd of 13 elk meanders through the rain-rich grass.

From this place of bucolic splendor, Hawthorne creates contemporary art jewelry. Her award-winning designs are both sophisticated and playful, and her palette is extraordinarily rich.

Not for her are the painterly, cloisonné portraits set in a brooch, or the fussy, faux-Victorian pieces favored by some artists.

Lisa Hawthorne's jewelry combines the inventive, surreal doodles of a painting by Joan Miro with the brilliant highlights and depths of an Old Master oil. Her medium is enamel on fine silver or 24-carat gold, and one of her gifts is her ability to incorporate unique gemstones into the work.

She points to a class taken during high school in Michigan - Design in Metals - as the genesis of her art. Initially she worked strictly in gold, silver, and gemstones. “But that got a little lackluster after awhile,” she laughingly explains. She turned to enameling because she wanted more color - and she turns to a Seattle distributor for her leaded enamels, “because the color is so much more intense.”

Hawthorne's studio is tucked into the lower part of the home she shares with her husband, wood sculptor Steve Kuntz, and their 17-year-old daughter. And while windows afford gorgeous views and plenty of natural light, the studio's focus is on Hawthorne's tools: boxes filled with garnets, agates and amethysts; a hydraulic die press, clippers and enamels; rolls of fine gold wire, and the squat, gray, businesslike shape of a professional-grade furnace. The process of creating Hawthorne's one-of-a-kind jewelry is necessarily lengthy. “I'll pick a shape, and cut it out of fine silver,” she says. “If using transparents, I'll texture the silver ... I'll use leaves, or lace, or those green scrubbys - I'm always looking for textures.”

She opens a drawer and pulls something out - a stiff, grayish, slightly curved piece of manta ray skin. Backed with silver and put through a roller, the skin will imprint and Hawthorne will have an organic canvas for her modern designs. Cloisonné ribbons will impart shapes within enameled pools of color, and after as many as 20 firings, the piece will be ready for its stone.

The hallmark of Lisa Hawthorne's art jewelry is the interplay between her vibrantly hued enamel work, and the precious and semiprecious gemstones she incorporates as punctuation.

And her designs are clever. A forged pin may also be worn as a pendant; “A Delicate Balance,” the first-place 2007 NICHE award winner, was constructed with a built-in hinge. A series of gold-wrapped, elongated heart-shaped pendants (set with a trio of diamonds) feature a little converter, and were recently offered (and sold out) in the Hawthorne Gallery in Big Sur, Calif.

“We're a family of artists,” says Lisa, a claim corroborated by a glance at her family tree. Gregory, Chris, Lisa and Julie Hawthorne are all represented in the Big Sur gallery, as are Steve and Terry Kuntz. Lisa Hawthorne's jewelry is available locally in the gift shop at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort, and in the not too distant future, another gallery filled with Hawthorne art works will arise from the former Wheelhouse Restaurant, at Battle Rock on the Oregon Coast.

From leopard opals to Mexican fire agates, from purplish, rhodalite garnets to the crystalline facets of drusy cabochons, Hawthorne finds inspiration in gemstones. She brings a cosmopolitan self-assurance to her inventive designs, producing unique art jewelry from her Coquille Valley home.

Teri Albert reviews art and artists for the Ballyhoo! page of The World. Comments on or story ideas for this column are welcome, and can be e-mailed to malbert@uci.net.