Jewelry designer Rob Greene takes his cue from the gems that fascinate him.
by Pamela Selbert

brooch of 18K gold with Kentucky agate & onyx

Rob Greene of Marshfield, Vermont, never intended to be a jeweler. Although today Greene's elegant creations, dominated by patterned stones, especially opals, have all the marks of someone for whom jewelry design was destined, making them wasn't always in his plan. Farming is what he had in mind, raising chickens and vegetables to sell, tending beehives, and running a maple sugar business.

“That's not to say I haven't always been fascinated by gems and minerals,” says the New York City native, whose family moved to New Jersey when he was seven years old. “I grew up near an old quarry where I found quartz with inclusions and other stuff I thought was great.” Encouraged by a family friend who had a great collection, Greene became a rockhound at an early age.

But also near the family home was an old chicken farm and, roaming its acres, Greene dreamed of returning to the land. “I always wanted to live rurally. I liked art, but I also studied for the 'back to the land movement' in college.”

brooch of 18K gold with opal

It was at college, in 1967, that Greene first started making jewelry, fooling around with metal and making sculptures between semesters. At the time, he was attending Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, majoring in psychology. But because of his rural aspirations, and because Vermont “had the reputation of being a rural frontier 30 years ago,” Greene transferred to Goddard College in historic Plainfield, a small, quaint town a few miles northeast of Montpelier. He graduated in 1971 with a double major in art and agriculture.

“Back then, it seemed everybody interested in 'returning to the land' was migrating to Vermont, and I figured it wouldn't be long until all the wilderness was gone,” says Greene, tall, handsome, and with a sophisticated polish one might have trouble reconciling with a life behind a plow. So, believing Vermont was becoming “too urban,” he left for the wide-open spaces of New Brunswick, Canada, where land was available at cheap prices. He bought 165 acres for $2,000, and set up his farming operation, building his own house using only hand tools. He practiced subsistance farming for four years, making jewelry during the long, bitter winters. In the long run, however, he decided it wasn't for him, and he moved back to Vermont, where he now lives in a rustically elegant home that he designed and built himself. The location, secluded by ranks of giant pines, preserves the illusion of “frontier.” Views of Vermont's famous cone-shaped Green Mountains, are spectacular, with nary a chimney in sight.

An example of Greene's more ornate work, this brooch features an opal shaped roughly like an arrow in a piece that resembles a traditional church, with onyx buttresses and 18K gold framework. This, one of his larger pieces, is 3" wide.

Greene shares this sublime setting with his longtime companion Sue Osmond, an artist originally from Buffalo, New York. The two met 10 years ago at a gem show where Sue's sister, a jeweler, had an exhibit. Several of Osmond's works, some of them stylized paintings similar to those of the Greek iconographers, decorate their home. Primitive earth-tone tapestries are also part of the decor, as are a dozen ceramic planters containing another of Greene's passions, graceful porcelainlike lavender and white orchids. It's obvious that a bonafide green thumb is in residence.

Also sharing their secluded homestead are their two pets, who are clearly part of the family. Kitty, a Siamese mix, glides through the rooms with the confidence of someone who figures she owns the place. And nearly the entire sun room is devoted to the enormous cushion bed belonging to Tyrone, a 100-pound, nine-year-old German shorthair dog. Tyrone, according to Greene, loves stalking butterflies.

CHANGING JOBS. After returning to Vermont, Greene went to work for a silver supplier in Plainfield, just a few miles from his home, cutting silver to fill orders. About that time, he also started doing jewelry seriously, sending pieces, “married metalwork, acid-etched pieces, some lapidary,” to the Vermont Craft Center in Middlebury. He also spent four months traveling in the West, and while visiting rock shops in Santa Fe, bought a grinder and other materials. In 1975, making jewelry became a full-time job.

Opal and onyx brooch with 18K gold. Roughly 2"x2"

“I never made the conscious decision to be a jeweler,” he says with a smile. “The hobby just became consuming.”

Now, in his well-equipped studio, where worktables sprout the implements of his trade and walls are decorated with a dozen large posters showing photo enlargements of his jewelry, Greene works eight to 10 hours a day, seven days a week, fabricating his exquisite creations. On one table, half a dozen small cardboard boxes hold gold findings; on another, on this occasion, gold earrings soak in water after their acid bath.

Other containers hold plum-size chunks of luscious Madagascar rose quartz, rich green-black cabs of tourmaline from Brazil, and thin slices of bright Australian opal, purple sugilite, palmwood, and mahogany-brown dinosaur bone. Here, too, are small, triangular shapes of red cuprite, and glowing slabs of neon-blue chalcedony. A stunning 105-carat moonstone is “waiting for just the right design for setting.”

A faceting machine stands ready, but Greene rarely uses it. The lathe on which he makes wax models gets more use, as do the sand-blasting machine and the oxygen-acetylene and oxygen-propane torches that are fastened to one of the worktables for soldering work.

Greene shows a fondness for what he calls “odd agates,” such as the Kentucky agate in the pin above with onyx and 18K gold.

Greene explains that after he sandblasts gold (“because I believe it needs texture”), he polishes it with aluminum oxide grit, then glass bead grit, and finally Scotch Brite to “soften the sand blasting and add richness.” Bezels and highlights are simply polished. He believes the color of the stones stand up better against a matte finish.

Greene notes that all his retail pieces - one-of-a-kind pins, pendants, bracelets, rings, and earrings - are made of 14-karat and 18-karat gold, both yellow and white. From the time he started doing jewelry, Greene always did some work with gold, but it took time for him to gain the confidence to work with gold exclusively. “In the beginning I was more cautious - I went to gold completely about 15 years ago. Today I work nearly on the same scale in gold as I once did in silver.”

Once Greene did his own casting as well as his own fabricating, but “then I learned I could farm it out reliably - the creativity is in making the mold,” he says. Today a New York firm takes care of the casting.

STONE CHOICES. Greene's pins, which form the foundation of his work, incorporate an intriguing range of stones - “odd agates,” such as Kentucky agate, ornate with black and milky-gray color spanned by wavy diagonals of red; rich caramel-like Montana agate; geodes filled with brightly striped agate in a host of colors; and jaspers, “for their color and scenic quality.” He's especially fond of California poppy jasper, a stone that looks like it could have been designed by a late-Impressionist painter who paired lobes of mustard yellow with arcs of blood red and black.

Greene sandblasts his gold because he believes a matte finish works the color of the stones he uses show up better. This brooch uses agate.

Especially intriguing is a clattery handful of Chicklet-shaped nuggets - Greene explains that these emerged from a copper ore smelter after the ore and the refractory fire brick had melted together and the brick became calcified. The unusual little rectangles look like pure reddish copper speckled with white amoebalike shapes. One day, Greene plans to work them into a pin, but for the time being, they're fun to play with.

But it's opal, fabulous Australian opal washed with the deep rich blues and greens of a sun-shot sea and tinged with flecks of blazing fuchsia, that dominates his work. Opals are framed with mother-of-pearl and onyx stripes, are sliced in two by onyx bands, or are simply round like the hub of a gold wheel. Or they're set into thin sword shapes like tiny Excaliburs, or set as simple triangles on acid-etched gold squares - and every one is more stunning than the last. But whatever stone he's setting, Greene explains, it and the style of the piece it occupies are inextricably linked.

Brooch with “amethyst sage” (amethyst and jasper).

“Sometimes I create the design for my pins,” he says. “But more often the stones, like agate geodes, which have strong patterns, dictate what the style will be. I call it 'stone directed.'”

Greene explains that he gets a basic idea of what he wants to do, then picks a stone, altering the design according to the stone's potential. “My work is a compromise in that sense.” He describes himself as “not too spontaneous, rarely changing a design once the work begins.”

As a lapidary, Greene is totally self-taught. “I learned it by trial and error, by grinding stuff to dust,” he says with a laugh. “I do a lot of inlay, gold in onyx, onyx in opal, but I don't facet.” Greene buys faceted stones to use in his cast pieces, but no faceted gems appear in any of his one-of-a-kind pins. The black onyx which he often uses to “frame” other stones is cut in Germany. He also often buys huge cabs for reshaping.

Australian opal, as in the pin below (with onyx and 18K gold), dominates Greene's work.

“People don't sell their best rough material, they work it,” he believes. “So I buy large cut stones, treating it like proven rough with no cracks, but then I may totally change the shape.” Greene “grinds and polishes with a Titon, six wheels that go from 120 grit to 1200 grit to leather,” he explains. He also makes his own elements of tubing and wire.

On this occasion, Greene has spread a selection of his pins on a black velvet cloth on his dining table. The windows here, as do those in his studio directly below, open to spectacular views across the opulent gardens to the smoky-blue mountains that roll like high, ever-paler waves to the distant horizon; it's so beautiful you wonder how he gets any work done. But when he switches on a high-watt jeweler's lamp over the pins, displaying them to best effect, attention is immediately drawn away from the window to his own creations.

brooch of 18K gold with opal & onyx

One pin features an oval of rainbow hematite and agate, an unusual blend in which a band of silvery metal appears to flow across swirls of caramel and white. Another is set with a stunning agate cab patterned by nature into a lake-at-sunset scene, pale gray water edged by evening-blackened trees against a yellow sky.

Another, one of Greene's favorites - he admits to being partial to quartz with unusual inclusions - features narrow bands of black onyx over and under a half-barrel shape of clear Brazilian quartz. Tiny gold posts on either side of the quartz, and small, round tiers of gold accenting the onyx give the piece the look of a miniature porch light, with the quartz the shade and the inclusions the bulb. The rounded quartz is highly unusual, spiked as it is with pale silver needles of holmquisite (Greene, believes) and tiny reddish spears of hematite crystals, and shadowed with phantom crystals that have left behind a hollow shape, but no material. Such a crystal, he laughs, “would have fulfilled a childhood dream,” had he found it in that long-ago quarry.

“The dome shape of the quartz magnifies the [included] material,” he says. “I use this shape often, especially in clear quartz or rose quartz, believing it adds depth to a piece.” And of course there are the opals, often paired with slender crescents or bands of black onyx, clearly a preferred color combination as the two stones reappear in many of his pieces, though each is nonetheless distinctly individual.

Moonstone and diamonds set in sandblasted gold brooch.

FRAMING THE PICTURE. One particularly unusual opal, which combines wave shapes in both pale and bright, near-neon shades of blue, is a thin boulder formation on an iron stone matrix, a “natural doublet,” Greene says. At only a millimeter in thickness, it couldn't be cabbed, and has the slightly wavy look of fractured glass. Like many of the cut stones he buys, Greene has slightly reshaped this one.

Setting this stone, he “echoed the rolling pattern of the opal in the gold,” he explains. The gold bezel is decorated simply, with four tiny elements - evenly spaced bits of gold tubing and wire, minute fused cylinders.

“I try not to detract from the stone, but to allow the setting to frame the picture, emphasizing the stone,” he says. “My settings are designed to pick up patterns in the stones and mirror them.”

Simpler gems are given uncomplicated settings, such as the disk of black onyx centered with a single, large, perfectly round, luminous white pearl, set in gold for a pin as straightforward as a tie tack. Another example, nearly as frugal with decoration and equally as elegant, features a magnificent 80-carat moonstone, milky and shimmery. The stone is bezeled into a round of matte-finish white gold, and fanned by eight tiny spokes of yellow gold, each one tipped with a tiny diamond.

Rob Greene

More ornate is the pin that features a rainbow-patterned opal shaped roughly like an arrow. The elegant stone, sliced in half lengthwise, shows seaweedlike forms in various shades of green, with alternating vertical bands of vibrant blue and fiery red along the center of the stone. To my eye, the pin resembles the front of a traditional church, with the sloping opal roof outlined in gold, and onyx buttresses, also outlined in gold, supporting the opal wall; a tier of gold steps leads to the small triangular onyx door, and a smaller onyx triangle forms the roof peak.

On this early-morning occasion, Greene has been more than generous with his time, as his dentist in Marshfield is expecting him.

Unfortunately, we've made him late. He graciously offers to postpone the trip, but it's not necessary. I just have one more question . . . what keeps him making jewelry?

“I like the small-scale work, the focus on detail. I like the materials, like playing around with the materials within the framework of my jewelry.” Then he considers further and answers simply, “It's a format I enjoy that I can make a living doing.”

Rob Greene may be contacted by writing to 5428 Hollister Hill Road, Marshfield, VT 05658, or by calling (802) 426-3841. Pamela Selbert is a freelance writer based in Missouri.