Design
From the beginning, bead art was a framework for design. Its artistic perspective was organized around colors and materials, cycles of light, shadow, color, and repeating geometric patterns.
The entwine of bead and design, artisanship and handcraft takes place on many levels. Bead design suggests a common thread, sequence, or musical pattern in repeating form and color, textural pattern, interchanging images, and dramatic shapes, curves, flowing lines and spirals.
The ancients knew the dramatic element in the human psyche needed design, which reciprocated nature’s correspondence of form and color, and mirrored our indissoluble relationship with the earth.
Ancient bead design revolved around geometric angles, points and lines, floral and curvilinear motifs, and was like a mandala or visual experience of life, and used materials such as shell, lapis-lazuli, chrysoprase, gold, which symbolized such forces of nature as earth, air, fire, or water.
Bead Elements & Design Show craft artists make it possible to present design as a visual experience of life. In the past three decades a whole new generation of beadmakers and craft artists have begun work on this ancient template, which is beauty in its most natural form, fusing the visual patterns of nature with the creation and the perception of art.
In this way, Bead Elements & Design Show goes beyond the usual trade show, fashion show model, by observing design through the template of art, rejecting what is passing and trivial and embracing patterns of renewal, celebrating the connections between nature and human spirit.
The colors and patterns of bead design make it possible to draw and arrange these connections, seeing color on the spiritual realm, pattern on many levels, putting together interrelated components, spacings, and findings.
Ancient bead design has an immediate personal effect, a sense of being pulled into deeper awareness, where art is not for the eyes alone, but inexdtricably bound to rhythmical, musical forces, and bound to seasons and cycles.
