Hooked on High Tech by Andy Oriel

"I can’t restrict myself to one genre, like most designers," he says in a confident, professorial tone. "Consequently, I’ll go from Southwestern to Greek revival in the same week. I’m constantly collecting worldwide ideas so that my store will appeal to the most people."

And it appears to be working. Burchett has transformed a former machine shop that manufactured spurs into a gallery filled with everything from beads bought on a trip to Nepal to fossils snagged at a flea market in Moscow. A giant freshwater aquarium stands in the front of the store, and framed Denver and Tucson gem show posters line one wall. Although the seven telephones, three stereo systems, and two computers sometimes make the gallery seem more like a high-tech electronics outpost than a jewelry store, that impression changes when you pass through the curtains to the back where Burchett and jeweler Louise Sanchez share two worn benches and an arsenal of tools. And downstairs, beneath the spur factory’s original wood floors, is a cavernous basement where, among the odors of ozone and wet rock, a complete lapidary shop speaks decidedly more of Old World craftsmanship than of cutting-edge technology.

"It’s all part of running a jewelry store in the ‘90s," says Burchett. "The traditional rock shop has changed. You have to be more on top of trends, and you have to be able to supply knowledge as well as gems and minerals and jewelry."

Though he has done just that for more than 14 years, Burchett is remarkable reserved about the astonishing quantity of pieces he has made-numbering in the thousands. Especially in a business where egos are as big as open-pit mines and signature styles are worn like badges.

"I avoid having a ‘style’ at all costs," he says, using his fingers as quotation marks. "I don’t want to be pegged as this or that. I work hard to make each new design a fresh surprise. I want people to say, ‘You did this?’ quotation mark, not, ‘You did that!’ exclamation point."

The Dave Burchett look "depends on the day of the week;" the closest he comes to a constant element is the admission that he works mostly in silver.

"Silver is inexpensive enough to make wild experiments. Plus, I tend to make my pieces heavier than other jewelers do. I can blow through 20 ounces of silver in a week. Gold would be much more restrictive.

If Burchett has made a virtue of necessity-by crafting a wide variety of styles to satisfy customers-he has, in the process, satisfied his own unbounded curiosity for learning how things work.

Contemporary and technical in many respects, Burchett’s "modern" pieces are designed with the same thoughtfulness as his neoprimitive boxes with their Paleolithic hand prints, spirals, and cave painting motifs. His fascination with history, culture, and the iconography of American life in the ‘90s is expressed in both, and both are experiments-to try and solve problems and learn how things work.

"I like boxes because they are a cross between an object of art and functional jewelry," he says. "Since they’re bigger, it also gives me the opportunity to experiment with more elaborate designs."

IMAGES OVER IMAGERY. While much of Burchett’s work, such as his Rock Dancers series of rock-art bracelets, leans heavily toward ethnic and tribal motifs, it would be a mistake to assume that he holds strong specific beliefs about the meanings of the symbolic imagery they hold. In fact, he stubbornly resists reading anything more into his jewelry than what shows on the surface.

"For me, the elements of design are interesting primarily in a visual sense," he explains. "The petroglyphs are fascinating because they predate modern design techniques and they are a vision that comes purely from the mind. But I never attach any spiritual significance to my designs. All my jewelry is an empty glass, and I let the people who buy it fill in the meaning for themselves. Customers ask me all the time, ‘What do these symbols mean?’ And I always say, ‘That’s for you to figure out.’"

Whether modernistic or neoprimitive, many of Burchett’s recent "experiments" share another common element: they were designed using sophisticated computer software. It’s one aspect of his work that separates him from most other jewelers and something that has absorbed a great deal of his time and energy.

Accepting Burchett’s offer of a lesson in cyber-design, I drive to his home in north Boulder where he does most of his keyboard surfing. The large two-story house is a busy place where the dust never settles-especially not in the oak-lined kitchen where Dave’s wife, Cathy, has just finished giving a baking lesson to a group of sixth graders. Everything seems to come in twos: as two large vacuum cleaners (a lab and a retriever) happily lick up the crumbs, a pair of ferrets cavort in a cage by the table, and two guinea pigs bark every time the refrigerator door is opened, which is often when Dave’s two sons, Tim and Jason are around.

Down a winding stairwell bursting with Navajo rugs and knickknacks, Burchett converses on everything from bits and bytes to the warps and wefts of his favorite rugs. Turn a corner and his office/den reveals he is serious about both. More Navajo rugs vie for space with two giant-screen televisions, one 40 inches, the other a 100-inch monster. A drafting table sits in the corner next to his work station.

"I still do a lot of drafting-table work," he says, booting up his system, "but using a computer lets you try a lot of different design ideas quickly. The advantage is that you can go from having an idea to getting it down on paper right away. It also allows you to be far more accurate with patterns and repetitive design elements."

Slipping a floppy disc into his disc drive, Dave shows me just how quickly, and how accurately. Talking while he works, he explains his two basic methods of design.

"Sometimes I will draw something like this freehand and then scan it in," he says, referring to a flowing organic rock art design of a vaguely human figure. "With more angular, geometric pieces, like the patterned box lids, I’ll usually design it all in the computer using the Corel Draw software.

"Watch quickly, because I’m going to do a box lid in about a minute," he says, drawing a circle on the screen. "After drawing the inner circle, you can make a design by rotating a box around a center like this. Now I’m going to heavy it up, size it, align it, and put an outside circle around it."

Transferring the image from the computer monitor to the 100-inch screen behind him, Burchett gives a last visual check on a massive scale that he says helps him to see the design from a fresh perspective. "Send it to the printer and boom-camera-ready artwork for a patterned box lid.

"A lot of designs come from saying, ‘I wonder what this would look like,’" he says, slipping in another CD-ROM. Turning his chair 180 degrees to the giant screen behind him, he pulls out a joystick and plays his favorite computer game, Fury 3, in Surround Sound.

SOMETHING GENETIC. It’s a week later and we are having coffee at Peaberry’s across the street from Topaz. To lure customers from the dozens of other coffee shops that dot almost every corner, Peaberry’s has installed a pool table that we do our best not to rip, tilt, or spill coffee on. Taking turns embarrassing ourselves with terrible shots, I ask Burchett how he got started in jewelry.

"My mother was an artist, a very good painter, my father was a computer programmer, and my sister is a graphic artist, so it must be something genetic," he begins.
I remember when I was about 12 years old, I got into my mother’s jewelry box and pried all the stones out of her costume jewelry. I put them all in a white sock and tied it around my waist. When Mom found out, she sat me down with a pair of pliers and some glue and made me put everything back. I had more fun putting them back together than I did taking them apart!"

While other kids were building model cars, Burchett was building architectural models. But while his mother hoped for him to become, "my son, the architect," as Burchett recalls, he was more interested in making jewelry. His formal education in the art began his first year in high school and it wasn’t long before he had the run of the shop. Many of his teachers became his best customers, lining up at the annual jewelry shows to buy his squash-blossom necklaces.

"I generated a lot of spending money in high school," he remembers. "I saved it up, and my last year of high school I moved into my own apartment and set up a bench on the balcony. It taught me to work fast, because I was sometimes working in subfreezing temperatures.

"I see people from 20 years ago who are still wearing some of those pieces," he recalls fondly. "I feel good that they’ve lasted that long and could easily go another 20."

After high school, Burchett paid his way through college by helping cut tons of turquoise into cabochons. After graduating from the University of Colorado with a degree in geology, he did a stint as an oil-field geologist. But it wasn’t long before the siren call of the arts drew him back to Boulder, where he opened Topaz in 1983.

"I decided that if I wanted to have control over where I lived, I would have to open my own business."

While technology has always played an important part in Burchett’s jewelry, whether through new tools or new techniques, the hallmark of his design is the multitude of ethnic and stylistic motifs that he weaves together into a pleasing fabric.

That his more recent and most sophisticated use of computer-aided design has been for his most primitive and most ethnic series of jewelry is probably no more than a happy coincidence. Nevertheless, the irony of the techno-retro culture clash is not lost on him.

"I’ve always had a fascination with old cultures, and modern cultures too, because I look at them as a window to the past," he explains. "What fascinates me about them is that with respect to their jewelry, they were able to make such perfect jewelry with such limited tools. And here I am trying to live up to that heritage with a fortune in tools and computers at my disposal. I occasionally find it disheartening that I am rarely able to come up to their level."

The subject reminds him of an experience in Nepal where he went to examine a tourmaline mine in the northeast. Before his trek, he left three pure silver coins at a jeweler’s shop in Katmandu and asked the jeweler to make something for his wife.

"He worked in a small room where the only light was the sun coming over his shoulder," Burchett recalls. "He didn’t even have bottled gas, just oil and a blowpipe, and some hammers and files. When I came back to the shop, he had made a necklace with over 800 links out of the coins. It made me realize that high technology and machinery allow you to work more quickly, but sometimes it also can cover up for a lack of skill."

HIGH-TECH DESIGN. It is to Burchett’s credit that his high-tech equipment does not cover up for lack of skill on his part, nor does his jewelry have the cold look and feel of machine-made objects - probably because beyond the technical aspect of his preliminary design work, most of his pieces are made with simple tools and familiar techniques of silver smithing and stone cutting. And always with a sensibility that is uniquely his own.

His Deconstructed Pebbles series, for example, grew out of his geologist’s love of the highly polished granite pebbles that fill nearby Boulder Creek. But after experimenting with simple forms for setting the "found stones" into jewelry, Burchett’s artistic side, as it always does, seized the rein.

"A lot of jewelers make jewelry from found objects, and in truth, many of my pieces look like they were made with found objects but aren’t. If I can’t find what I’m looking for in nature, I’ll actually cut stones to look like they were found on a beach. Then I slice them and reassemble them with bands of lapis, turquoise, and opal in between. It’s interesting because you’re never quite sure what you’ll end up with.."

Another very successful production series is Burchett’s Boulder Bear line of Zuni-like bear fetish pendants made out of gemstones and granites. But other series, just as creative, have failed to fly.

"One thing a computer can’t do is tell you if a line is going to be successful," jokes Burchett. "I have some pieces I will probably take to the grave with me. But I consider them to be a success anyway because they’ve attracted a lot of attention and people talk about them."

One of the bombs was a series of personal classified advertisements cast in silver with a small frame designed to hold a photograph. Another was a line of hefty granite bracelets set in heavy silver bezels that only Wilma Flintstone could love. In spite of the failures, he has a good average, and no one - not even Burchett himself - can ever be sure what he will come up with next.

He describes his creative process instead in the scientific terms he feels more comfortable with: "I don’t think my style has evolved so much as changed by a punctuated equilibrium," he says, referring to the theory of evolution where long periods of stability are broken by sudden change.

The misses, or failures, are just as important as the hits, according to Burchett. "I try not to use the same method of design all the time. Sometimes I will completely change my method of design and style of drawing. My goal is to be able to lay 10 of my pieces on the table so that no one on the planet could tell you they were all made by the same person. Consequently, each style lives or dies on its own merits."

As much as he denies that his work is breaking down the walls that compartmentalize styles, cultures, and even art and science, it is possible that he is doing just that. In any case, his jewelry is exciting both to look at and to wear.