LOVING HANDS

My loving hands

are embroidering a cloak for you

with the cape of jasmine

and the collar of clear water.

When you were my sweetheart

during the white spring

the hooves of your horse

were like four silver sighs.

Verses for Flamenco, Federico García Lorca

Diane Tintor’s jewelry is an art of symbols. It invites intimacy with nature to touch hidden desires and secret halls of memory.

The prancing horse, crow, praying mantis, dove, rose, traces of bird’s wing, or leafy boughs, trembling in arid wind, are reminders of beautiful things seen everywhere. Isolated or repeated in gold, enhanced with colored stones on somber silver fields, these fragments are luminous apparitions of intense, sometimes buried, feelings.

The linear foundations of the pieces are inspired by rectangles of purists like Malevich, a clarity also indebted to Italian Renaissance architecture and the reflexive anatomy of ancient Greek temples. Greek and Franciscan crosses extend beyond traditional religions, functioning as maps or plans which signal other versions of majesty. The darkened atmosphere of the silver, achieved with sand or engravers’ tools, passes like storm clouds through these sites, investing them with soulful longing.

To imagine ornaments as small, dazzling loci of restrained passion derives from the artist’s attraction to flamenco and Argentine tango. In such dances, complex patterns evolve into rhythms of enflamed endurance and sensuality, always preserving disciplined severity. Diane Tintor’s pieces contain such trembling assertions. Like the dancers, hers is a formal art that breathes and glows.

To the poet Garcia Lorca, who restored many old Spanish folk songs to flamenco, intense feelings were never far from the consecrating hands of the artist-lover.

In the streets...

they killed a dove.

With my hands I shall cut

the flowers for her crown.

Such lines help us to understand the art of Diane Tintor. There is always a tragic sense, as in Lorca’s horse, with its regretful hooves sounding “four silver sighs,” or in hands that mark death with a crown.

For Diane Tintor, jewelry, like song, exceeds adornment. It is an act of homage. Shaping metals she looks for joy. She also proposes contemplation, silent, rapt, ecstatic.

- Eugenia Parry