Matt Fischer
"I would consider myself an artist before a jeweler but my medium is obviously metal. I started as a means to travel around with these bands that I like and make money on the side. That's when I was still doing wire wraps and everything like that. The main band I traveled around with was Phish. I did a bunch of years on tour with them and sold my wire wraps and just slowly transition into what I do now," said Matt Fischer, hand fabricated jeweler of Wolfmans Sun Designs.
Matt's jewelry career lifted off while he was living in Colorado and his customers are mainly on social media. Every time he launches a piece it's sold within hours.
"I've been fortunate enough to have a really good following on social media and have that kind of support to where I'm able to just focus all my time on one of my original creations and have them be scooped up in a pretty timely manner. And it's funny, because some people always say, Oh, are you going to open a storefront? Are you going to do that? Maybe that would be cool someday. But that's just not something I'm really interested in, especially with the way social media is nowadays. I have a website, I just don't tend to use it because I'll post something or I'll hype it up on Instagram stories. By the time I get around to posting it, a lot of times it's already been claimed or somebody's doing a payment plan on it or something like that. Social media is my full-time job. I love it and I hate it. But it's a very good tool," said Matt.
He enjoys that his customers appreciate his style and they typically don't ask for custom work -- where the client typically drives the creativity of the piece.
"I always start with the center stone, that's always my main inspiration point. Once I have the center stone in hand, I always try to think of like, what kind of color palette could I do with this? My accent stones are my painting, and I have to decide what colors are gonna pop with this piece. Then I'll just start freehand styling around it on either the iPad, sometimes I'll use pen and paper, but usually on the iPad. Upload the image and start designing around it until I have something that I'm really feeling. Sometimes that can be a day, sometimes that can be a couple of days designing around there. Once I'm really feeling something, I just get to town on it. The process goes from design to melting down all the metals into the piece components I need to fabricate. That all usually takes two to three days to make the piece then once I have the piece made, then I'll do the same thing with my engraving, I'll upload the piece into the iPad, and draw around, figure out what I'm wanting for engraving with the space I have available, then I'll do my engraving, which I can usually rock out a full back piece in a day, maybe two if I'm being slow. Then from there, I set all the gems and call it a day. But a lot of my inspiration comes from the psychedelic art scene of painting. So I'm really into that. I'm really into the freedom of expression that happens within the jam band scene. You know you hear the same song five times, but it's completely different every time, and that kind of inspiration and lifestyle, I feel really impacts my work," said Matt.
The piece he worked on for the Big Reveal was quite challenging but rewarding at the same time.
"It can be stressful, for sure I try to not really focus on that. I let the experience unfold. In my creative process, I do all hand fabricated work. I don't do any CAD or wax sculpting or anything like that. All my work starts out as little rolling gray of gold, I melt everything down, and I roll out all my sheet. But the designing process for this one was a little bit challenging because the gem is so big. A lot of my work is more small, it's not so robust. I work a lot in the two to seven karat range for center stones. This one is 18 karat. Trying to design something around this big gem still felt authentic to my style and represented me as an artist and something that someone could look at and be like, Oh, that's a Wolfmans Sun piece or something like that. It was an engineering challenge to come up with a design, but I'm happy with it," said Matt.
To see Matt's final piece follow the Makers of the USA on Instagram and Facebook and Maine Mineral & Gem Museum on Instagram and Facebook as well as the images will be posted on both of those social media platforms.
To view Matt Fischer's work follow him on Instagram.