Jewelry Making with John Warhank By Writer and Contributor Emily McGinn
John Warhank has spent the last two and a half decades honing his jewelry-making craft. Working with silver, he creates one-of-a-kind pendants and rings, aiming to discover the unique.
Warhank has had various occupations throughout his life, but he most loves creating. He has also found joy in passing along his jewelry-making skills to others by teaching jewelry-making and silversmithing programs at Torrance Community Center.
“I love the idea of creating and then sharing that knowledge, teaching others how to do the same thing and letting them use their creative abilities to design their own jewelry in their own way that they would wear and share with other people,” Warhank says.
For Warhank, most jewelry pieces start with a flat piece of silver. Warhank works in both fabrication — manipulating metal into different shapes — and lapidary — cutting and polishing stones. He allows his pieces to dictate where they want to go and what they want to become.
“I let the stones that I'm working with talk to me and tell me how they want to be presented. To me, nature talks to us through our stones and so on,” Warhank says. “Stone will actually say something to me. And it may want to be a pendant, or may want to be a cabochon in a ring or whatever. I try to let that inner guide take me where it wants to go.”
Warhank applies his own skills, and his past experiences, to his teaching methodology. A former recreational therapist, Warhank has learned how to allow people to express themselves in their own way in sports, arts and crafts. He aims to provide his students with basic tools that will allow them to then explore their creativity further.
For his beginners class, he lays out seven projects that gradually build basic skills. They start with a band ring and then create a ring with a cabochon. As the students learn more, they eventually build up to crafting a spinner ring.
“They're taking the basics that they learned in the first class and creating a very different kind of a ring with the spinner ring, but they know how to do the basic ring, and all you're doing is now making three of them, and then the way you assemble them is the new lesson that they're going to be learning,” Warhank says. “And I let them do it at their own pace.”
Warhank aims to ensure that at the end of each three-hour class, his students go home with a finished product so they have immediate gratification and see their skills come to life.
In his own creative journey, Warhank has had to learn the value of staying true to his art, regardless of whether it matches everyone else’s tastes or not.
“Will somebody like my design? Will they accept the way I put this together? I think those are challenging things that I've overcome, because it's not up to everybody to love what I do, but somebody's going to love it, and once they become attached to it, they're going to love it,” Warhank says. “For instance, when I sell my jewelry, I always love it when somebody picks up a piece, looks at it, puts it down, looks all around, comes back and picks that same piece up and looks at it. If they do that the third time, it's sold. It hit them somehow, some way. And I love to see that happen, because at the same time they pick it up, you can see that little smile, that kind of feeling of ‘I found what I wanted.’”
One piece that stands out to Warhank is a necklace he made as a part of the Long Beach VA Hospital art program. A Vietnam veteran himself, Warhank participates in various groups at the VA hospital. To create the piece, he cast the shell and the meat of a walnut in sterling silver, and he added a back and a hinge so that the walnut closed like a locket.
“I do crazy stuff like that. I take twigs off of trees and cast the twigs in small pieces of sterling silver,” Warhank says. “Then I use that to make a ring shank, and I use it to put around other stones to create something that looks different, something that's just out of the ordinary.”
Warhank aims to avoid limiting himself in his art and to find new ways to grow. For example, he took up photography and started to learn how to take unique shots, even snagging some first place awards at the Long Beach Creative Arts Festival.
“I think our creativeness is only limited by our ability to step outside, because quite often [we say], ‘I'm not good at that. I'm not a good photographer.’ Well, if you say that long enough, that's what you're going to become,” Warhank says. “So open up your artistic mind and just let it flow. Don't try to limit it. I think you have to remember that if you judge it, then you limit it, so don't judge it. Just let it happen, and it'll come out.”
You can find Warhank selling his jewelry at the Del Monte Farmers Market on the first Saturday of every month and at the senior craft fair at the City of Torrance. You can find Warhank’s jewelry-making classes on the City of Torrance website.
“I think art is something that's changing in your life,” Warhank says. “It'll change you in a way that I think is very positive, so that when you create something, there's a satisfaction that you created this.”
Bio:
Emily McGinn is a journalist based in the Los Angeles area. She enjoys reporting on and writing about a variety of topics from lifestyle to news, especially in her areas of specialty, environmental science and political science.
