File talk:Tommy Singer 2.jpg

Hopi silver overlay and the Navajo copies of it, explained

Although Tommy Singer is a prolific and respected Navajo artist, placing a silver overlay bolo does not properly represent traditional Navajo (Dine) jewelry. Unless someone objects, I plan on on replacing this picture. And, adding a silver overlay piece to the section on the Hopi. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Donblade (talk • contribs)

I do. This phenomenon of Navajo copying Hopi is endemic in the Four Corners, since Hopi silver sells pricily. For you to remove this image would be to censor reality and skew the actual Navajo oeuvre, so to speak. I have made the following change to the image description, drawn on my extensive travels to both reservations, and having spent time with best Hopi silversmiths in residence. I also have a sizable collection of silver overlay (Hopi, with some early acquisitions of Navajo imitations when I did not know my ass from a ...wikt:sipapu :)):

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.

Cordially, --Mareklug ^talk 11:23, 17 February 2014 (UTC)