"Christine's Fighter" SR Johnson Knifemaker, Barry Lee Hands Engraver

[Barry Lee Hands]

Loveless style fighter, full integral construction,BG-42 steel, mother of pearl handles,6" blade,engraved with 24k inlay, overlay, And "Gilded Pearl" by Barry Lee Hands.

[KenB]

Simply beautiful. Thanks for posting.
KenB

[SEngraver]

Hi Barry,

Magnificent and and beautiful.The gold inlay on the black background looks out of this world.The whole knife is great.
Thanks for the picture

SE

[Ray Cover]

Hey Barry,

The knife is beautiful but the thing that caught my eye was your signature. Very clever idea. I like that a lot.

[Barry Lee Hands]

Thanks Ken and SE, it came out rather nice.
And Ray, I am glad you like the sig, it's lighthearted and fun.

[Phil Coggan]

Beautiful Barry.

Phil

[Dave London]

Just fantastic thanks Barry

[Barry Lee Hands]

Originally Posted by Phil Coggan

Beautiful Barry.

Phil

Thanks Phil, You were a big inspiration to me a few years ago to get off my butt and do some serious gold work, thank you for that.

Thanks Dave, I am always grateful for your input.

[bram ramon]

Absolute perfection! Beautiful!

[Daniel Houwer]

Thats awesome Barry,

[hoochiepapa]

I don't feel qualified to say anything except, beautiful!!
I was in Mindanao in 1967.

[Fred Marrinan]

Outstanding work.Thanks for posting for us to enjoy. Fred

[KeithPedersen]

Beautiful as always. Love the signature too.
Keith

[Superior Design]

Wow! It looks like something out of a legend. Is your signature is the hand marks?

[Barry Lee Hands]

Bram and Dan, thank you.
Thanks Hoochiepapa, Mindanao must have been grand in '67, I did not get there till'03, it is still a beautiful island and I wish I was there now.
Thanks Fred, and you are welcome.
My old friend Keith, thank you very much.
Omri, thank you, the hands are my signature.

[rod]

Barry,

You never disappoint, and thank you for your generous sharing! I very much enjoyed your lecture at FEGA Reno, which kind of turned the design process upside down, and to very good effect. Am I correct that your designs are getting more and more spare as you reach for a core essence in your creations, always exquisitely cut, and with less and less elements they draw us in more and more? It is as if your signature three element leaves are not so much resting on a canvas, but floating in three dimensional space. At Reno, you introduced us to 'tessellation', have you anymore insights into this journey you are on that you would like to share?

No matter, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Thank you.

Rod

[Tom McArdle]

Barry, that is great. It looks to me that your design journey has reached a new high point. That looks just like it is "supposed" to look. if you know what i am trying to say. It just looks right.

This will help me get of my butt,perhaps...

Thanks for the inspiration Barry! Your work not only furthers your creative impulses, but also satisfies your patrons while inspiring many others to do better art themselves. You have reached a high place in your artistic endeavors!

Take care,

Tom

[Barry Lee Hands]

Thanks Rod.
Your observations and grasp of my intent is so succinct I struggle to come up with a reply of equal merit.
You mention tessellation, I put an element in the guard in flush pink gold inlay, that is the framework of this design; the square you can see whose corners are obscured by the leaves.
This square was the basis of the whole design.
I was planning to erase it from the finished design, but since it seemed to compliment the design, insted of erasing it, I inlaid it flush in 22k pink.
On the Pommel, to reflect the same idea, is a circle in flush gold on which the leaf elements are hung.
Also, I deliberately violated the rule of three in my " Four Hands" logo, rather than using three or five.
I was trying to add tension by this violation, but it seems to have added a bit of whimsy.

I may have mentioned before, I don't think of this in euclidean terms, that is, leaves on spiral stems based on the golden mean originating from points of origin, but in Copernican/newtonion/Einstienien terms; my leaves are heavenly bodies of gold describing elliptical orbits around incredibly dense black holes, with cores of neutronium represented by negative space which has been obscured by clouds of invisible mysterious dark matter. . .

By this way of thinking I avoid using euclidean points of origin and utilize Copernican laws of planetary motion applied to ornament.

As I progress I think more and more in tessellated inductive layout.
Even when I set it aside and use deductive layout, working with tessellations changed the way I look at any layout, concieved by any means.

Tom, thank you very much, I like it also.

[WVEngraver]

Great stuff Barry. I'm really curious to see how you integrate flow into a tessellated design layout. I'm sure it will rock!!

[Titian]

Wonderful work. I love it.

[rod]

Quote:
"I may have mentioned before, I don't think of this in euclidean terms, that is, leaves on spiral stems based on the golden mean originating from points of origin, but in Copernican/Newtonion//Einstienien terms; my leaves are heavenly bodies of gold describing elliptical orbits around incredibly dense black holes, with cores of neutronium represented by negative space which has been obscured by clouds of invisible mysterious dark matter. . . "

Barry,

Now you are getting me even more interested, thank you. Your art and craft are to the fore these days, but I do remember that you have a degree in electronics tucked away in your back pocket, and so you are particularly well placed to use art to move us all closer to today's cutting edge work in cosmology. I think we may both agree that whereas scientific/mathematical types can certainly manipulate the behavior of such things as gravity, spacetime, mass, quantum behavior, etc., the best minds are still like babes in the wood, and struggle to give any answer to a child's innocent question, "what is mass/space/ energy/ etc". The field is wide open to any who can project us into the core of this tussle. The problem with life, as another Johnson (not Doctor Johnson) once said, "..is that life is so familiar, however it is deeply mysterious ...". The artist's canvas may be quite powerful, as we get deeper and deeper into this. I say that anyone who faces even one moment of being alive, totally open, is to know that Life is a terrifying miracle, almost unfit for human consumption. That's what we bit off at birth, so what to do with it?

Okay, enough of all that, but I bet Kepler, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, etc al, would love to have your knife on their person, to gaze into it for inspiration, even if it was just to occasionally sharpen their pencil, as they continued to jot down the next bold idea?

By the way, that wonderful communicator, 'string theory' guy, Brian Green, is presenting a "Fabric of the Cosmos" weekly on Nova:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics...of-cosmos.html

You would love it, he would love to see your knife, and what you have just written here ...

best

Rod

[Barry Lee Hands]

Thamks Rod- " Fabric of the Cosmos" an interesting series, however, I do not subscribe to string theory, seems manufactured to me, inelegant, unprovable, unobservable.
If I may quote Einstein- "When the solution is simple, God is answering".
And how could I engrave tiny vibrating strings?

[Doc Mark]

"And how could I engrave tiny vibrating strings? "

As tiny, "gilded" sine waves!!!!!

[rod]

Lord, Doc,

Your gravers must be super sharp!

I must say that I do agree with Barry, that string theory has no chance of ever being proven, and so must enter into a mathematically compelling 'religion'. Although Cosmology interests me, as we are all imbedded in it and its behavior, I am emotionally attached to Newtonian mechanics, and love to see mechanisms working before my eyes. Perhaps that is because my boyhood was all about steam locomotives to get to school, and steam paddle steamers to journey up the lochside. I will however be using gasoline powered pistons to get me over the Donner Pass to Reno in January, and hoping to rub shoulders with the usual suspects, hoping they and many more make it to FEGA?

best

Rod

[Barry Lee Hands]

I think gravity is the effect of electrons and other wavicles between quantum states.
What do you think? Have I come up the practical outline of Einstein's elusive unified field theory, the simplicity of which he overlooked because of his revulsion of quantum mechanics?