“I always start with a sketch. They’re pretty rudimentary sketches, but strangely when I finish a piece, it always looks remarkably like what I’d first sketched,” Jewelry artist Kathy Caldwell tells me as she indicates a spiral notebook packed with pencil drawings that sits at one of several workstations she’s set up for jewelry making and design in the corner of the garage of the Santa Fe-style La Quinta Cove home she shares with her husband.
The San Marino, California, native began designing and making jewelry in the 1970s after college and continued when she and her first husband moved to Evanston, Illinois, and started a family. However, after her marriage ended, she moved back to California and became vice-president of sales with J. Jessop and Sons, the venerable San Diego jewelers who closed their doors in 2017 after 125 years in business. Eventually, she left the corporate world and was irresistibly drawn to creating her own jewelry again. “But having a business background really helped me,” she says. “You have to be able to design it, make it, market it and sell it.”
Caldwell and I hit it off immediately. We’re both from the Pasadena area and both attended UC Berkeley. Our great-grandfathers and grandfathers probably knew each other in LA city government and our ancestors both immigrated from Cork. We decide not to compare any more biographical notes in case it turns out we’re cousins. We continue our tour of her workspace, where she shows several stunning pieces in the process of completion. I am particularly taken with several simple, silver collars that look as if they could adorn the neck of one of Coco Chanel’s postwar models.
Caldwell begins with the stone or retro pieces she’s sourced from her online vendors. The stones are always eye-catching and exotic, whether they’re multi-colored Koroit opals from Australia, New Mexican turquoise, denim lapis or Sonoran sunrise stone; the vintage pieces may be African in origin or a fifties piece in which Caldwell sees an element that might be creatively repurposed. “People say that my jewelry is retro and timeless. I am very influenced by (Danish mid-century designer) Georg Jensen. I love the Scandinavian shapes. It’s sculptural, simple and organic. I am a fabricator; I don’t do any casting, so I like to bend shapes into organic forms.”
When she’s not selling at shows, Caldwell can always be found in her little corner-of-the-garage studio. She’s had dozens of pieces in various stages at all times, including her immensely popular silver ring necklaces that sell out wherever she takes them. During the pandemic, she kept on creating, even though there was nowhere to sell her jewelry. As a result, she has inventory that could fill the display cases of a couple moderate-sized stores. But now that shows are re-opening, she has a full calendar of shows where she strategizes whether it’s a better fit to display the $150 earrings or the sensational $5,500 items.
Back in 2005 when she first settled into La Quinta, she had dreams of one day making it into what was then known as the La Quinta Arts Festival. The next year, she met Kat Hughes, one of the principles of the festival, who immediately recognized a talent worth encouraging. Five years later, in 2010, Hughes told Caldwell she “was ready.”
Caldwell has been in every show since. “It’s a highly vetted show and I am very grateful to be one of the few local artists to be included.”
