Jade from the Kunlun Mountains in western China, a rough topaz the size of a cantaloupe, a hefty quartz crystal and a piece of brilliant green and white jadeite from Guatemala. During a phone interview from her Portland, Ore., home in December, Naomi Sarna listed just a few of the gems and minerals that were on windowsills, in glass cases and sitting on the floor beneath her desk.
“I’m always surrounded by my stones,” said Ms. Sarna, a jewelry artist and gem carver whose collection of several hundred pieces, kept in her homes in New York City and Portland, was gathered during visits to mines around the world. “I have to see pieces to get to know them and become excited about their potential.”
Born within walking distance of the great mines of Butte, Mont. — a city whose mineral resources once prompted the nickname the Richest Hill on Earth — Ms. Sarna was a child when she accompanied her maternal grandfather on explorations of defunct mines and the local university’s collection of minerals.
That self-reliant community fostered her drive to create: “We learned to do everything with our hands,” said Ms. Sarna, whose first foray into jewelry came at 7 years old when she glued shells onto plastic discs and sold them, as earrings, to neighbors. (Ms. Sarna declined to disclose her current age, saying, “If you’re a woman over 50, people think about you in a certain way.”)
At 20, she completed a three-year course in classical sculpture at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. There, she sought “to understand what created the line of beauty,” said Ms. Sarna, who has made serpentine curves a recurring theme in her work.
She moved to New York in the 1970s and, reluctant to become a starving artist, initially founded a catering company called Montana Palace, then turned to other careers, including 35 years as a licensed psychoanalyst. During this time, Ms. Sarna occasionally attended weeklong jewelry-making and gem-carving courses, slowly developing ideas she wanted to create one day.
After her husband’s death in 1998, Ms. Sarna turned to real estate development in New York and Los Angeles (psychoanalysis involved “too many sad stories,” she said). But she also started to carve gems and create jewelry in earnest, studying with Heikki Seppa, a metalsmith, and Bernd Munsteiner, a celebrated gem cutter. She said Mr. Munsteiner taught her to see the beauty in inclusions, the natural cracks and flaws found in many gems, and now she often makes them the focal points of her creations.
Since 2012, jewelry making has become her primary occupation. Today, her carving of a labradorite sunstone from Plush, Ore., is part of the Smithsonian’s gem and mineral collection in Washington, D.C., and her work has won more than 20 prizes at the American Gem Trade Association’s Spectrum Awards.
“She’s not afraid to try anything unusual and unique,” said Kimberly Collins, the trade association’s president. “Her jewelry and carvings are a feast for the eyes.”
In 2013, Ms. Sarna won the association’s Carving Award for L’Heure Bleu, an abstract carving of a 703-carat blue-violet tanzanite set on a sterling silver base. (L’Heure Bleu, or the Blue Hour, refers to the twilight between sunset and darkness.).
Ms. Sarna had purchased the stone the previous year while visiting a mine in Tanzania’s Merelani Hills, the only place that tanzanite is mined. Her visit was orchestrated by the Tanzanite Foundation, an industry organization.
Ms. Sarna said she always intended to sell the piece and give the proceeds to support eye care for the Masai, the ethnic group that lives in the mining area. Since Guinness World Records last year recognized the sculpture as the world’s largest cut tanzanite, she now plans to auction it in the spring, although details of the sale have not been settled.
Though Ms. Sarna’s one-of-a-kind gems and jewelry occasionally are available for purchase at museums and galleries, she primarily sells on her website and by appointment in New York and Portland. Her prices vary widely. For example, she priced the Sunrise pendant, a Mexican fire opal carved to enhance its orange hues, at $2,000 while the Pink Petal Brooch, which included 537 diamonds, sapphires and amethysts set in 18-karat white gold, was $118,000.
Nature has been a perennial theme in Ms. Sarna’s work: Petals, buds, leaves, mountains and shells recur, often rendered in sinuous lines reminiscent of flowing water. “Her ability to take a raw crystal and shape it into something that has the essence of the natural world is unique in the jewelry trade,” Stuart Wilensky, the founder of Wilensky Exquisite Minerals, a mineral and crystal gallery in New York, wrote in a recent email.
In 2019, Mr. Wilensky curated “Naomi Sarna: Stone in Motion,” an exhibition dedicated to Ms. Sarna’s sculptural pieces. “Naomi knows how to reveal the inner life of gemstones,” he wrote.
Since the pandemic prompted her to begin spending half the year in Portland, Ms. Sarna said, she has been enjoying opportunities to make larger sculptures. Her current projects include a Siamese fighting fish the size of a grapefruit, sculpted in blue chalcedony from China, and a 15-pound quartz crystal, called Star Seeker, that she has been carving for the past two summers at a carving camp program in Port Orchard, Wash.
“I feel very excited about all the possibilities,” Ms. Sarna said. “What’s it going to be next?”
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