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Precious stones and minerals speaking to your soulPrecious stones have a mysterious and magnetic quality that make them so absolutely mesmerizing to all. I believe they also provide a unique link between us and planet earth. Christine J. Brandt knows very well this feeling and capitalizes it to the maximum
Nature in all its forms is Christine’s main inspiration. Her workshop has beautifully illustrated books that render brilliant ideas. She’s also inspired with seascapes, a romantic sunset, the Norwegian Sea and the Coleus flower; as well as lily ponds, tiger lilies and other exotic flowers. A former textile designer, Christine began making her first jewelry collection in 2004 after 10 years of woodcarving.
Beginning her jewelry journeyWith her Japanese mother and Norwegian father, Chrsitine spent her childhood traveling between the Far East, Scandinavia, Spain and the United States.Reading through http://www.refinery29.com, I learnt that Christine followed a year of High School fashion studies in Paris with a BFA at New York's Parsons School of Design. After moving to Columbus, Ohio, for a job, Christine stumbled upon her muse. "When you move," she says, "it's not easy to make friends, so I started taking evening classes at a local arts centers to keep occupied."
Jewelry making quickly tested her personal demands for perfection and accuracy. "When I look back at my first ring, my biggest challenge was the fit. It was not easy to wear." She obviously found her way to making it more than right. In 2007, Christine participated in The Crown Jewels at Salon 94 Freemans, showcasing select pieces. In 2008, she won the Fine Jewelry category of the 11th Annual Rising Stars Award, she proved she’s an up-and-coming style-maker.
Passion for precious stones in their natural statePrecious stones are her main design element and means to make jewelry.The semi-precious stones and minerals found in her designs are all completely unique formations in their own matrix, meaning they are not cut, polished or dyed, but are as they are found in nature.
For example, amethyst, a well-known and much loved gemstone, is a variety of mineral quartz. It is made up of elongated prismatic crystals growing and ending as pointy six-sided pyramids. Amethyst form as druzes, crystalline crusts grouping the elongated crystals just explained. Small pieces of amethyst druzes is what Christine uses to make her jewelry. Cutting-edge jewelry with responsibilityChristine's pieces are finished in as natural a state as possible: the wood is never stained or varnished, but burnished and hand-rubbed with several coats of natural Danish oil to bring out the grain and natural colors in the wood.Christine is already on top of the green jewelry trend. We’ll all head that way some time soon. 
Sustainability and social awareness have not been in the jewelry industry agenda, but planet earth is gasping for attention, so it is our call to start paying attention to these issues and doing something about them. Christine once said: “The stones that I find are not conflict. They're minerals that are still found today in caves, and not so rare. I don't want to say that they're not precious, because they are all very precious”.
Once again a socially aware initiative, a new road for jewelry makers to explore. What I like most about Christine’s jewelry is the way she mixes the coarse texture of the precious stones with the soft movements and satin finish of the wooden rings. The end product is irresistibly sensual and provocative.
His fantastic sculptures with sensual forms, breath-taking voids and touchable surfaces are very similar to Christine’s wooden rings.
“All my pieces I carve by hand. I work with a rotary tool to carve out large chunks of matter, but the refined shape is created by hand gouges. I have a lot of hand gouges! You need a lot of control when working with sharp tools; it takes a lot of concentration to get the precise cuts. Usually when I start on a piece, I'm inspired by the materials. So, I have the stone and I have the wood and I look at the colors and try and match things up that I feel would be an interesting combination, for example, starting with a very grainy wood like wangy, which has a beautiful dark and light brown grain. And then I'll see a red-orange crystal that might be very beautiful with the browns and that inspires me to create a piece. So often, I don't have the idea already, like this is what I'm going to make. It just forms as I'm carving the pieces out. An average ring of a moderate size, maybe about an inch wide, like a silver dollar, takes about a week to carve and place and set.” Taking advantage of ideas and experience from other disciplinesAs I have discussed before, namely in Blanche Tilden’s work, there are infinite possibilities for cross-pollination between disciplines, and jewelry can benefit so much from that.Lots of artist, eg: Picasso, Alexander Calder, Frank Ghery, have made jewelry pieces, although it was not their primary artistic interest. What I am saying is that jewelry making can find in other disciplines not only inspiration but also mechanisms, technical processes, functional parts and in general, ways of solving problems that enrich our art. 
I think Christine agrees with me: “Before I made rings and necklaces, I was carving sculpture for ten years. One day I decided to take jewelry-making classes and do metalsmithing when I lived in Ohio. I combined my love of carving wood and my fascination of making things that you can actually wear, and put them together, and I started making jewelry out of wood. Not accidentally, but organically, my process just flows and things just start. I don't have an idea, I just start working and it just develops naturally”.
When the boxes are opened, the jewels float in olive-green mung beans, natures own packing foam. Being a child of several cultures, Christine has developed her own way of expressing herself in this art, articulating the best aspects of the cultures that have nurtured her. Christine is present in every sparkle of her precious stones and in every grain of her beloved exotic woods. More of her precious stones may be seen at her web-site:
http://christinejbrandt.com
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Between ceramics and glass enameling classes, Christine began making her first versions of her famous rings. 
Surely Henry Moore, one of my all time favorite artists, is a source of inspiration for Christine. 
