Black Mountain photo by Ulla Mclean

Anne Dick's workshop is situated on the edge of the Point Reyes National Seashore, surrounded by hills covered with fir, oak and bay trees, where foxes and coyotes, elk and deer, wildcats and cougars thrive. Three hundred and fifty species of birds live or fly through this area. Grey whales, harbor seals, and porpoises swim nearby.

Anne Dick studied jewelry making while attending The Principia school in St. Louis and later at San Francisco City College. Complementing her interest in the world of nature has been an involvement with both ancient and existing ethnic design. For a period she switched to direct metal sculpture and had shows in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Later she returned to making jewelry, using the techniques she had learned on a smaller scale.

The conventional jewelry techniques I had learned in school were too slow and cumbersome for my temperament. It was more stimulating to work with no drawings and no tedious sawing and filing between me and a fast-moving drop of molten metal using a tiny 5000 degree flame. Earlier interests in zoology and the culture of the ancient world exerted their influences on the emerging small metal forms. I loved textures and found them around me, the patterns on the sand, the mosses and lichens on the coastal rocks, tree bark, fungi, bird feathers, shale aggregates, and in the bronze forms I made. Animals and birds from the area as well as those from books took form in the molten metal as I moved the thin rod of bronze into a small but intense flame puddling, extruding, texturing it into something.

Anne Dick's workshop has turned out thousands of original designs since 1960. Eventually, it became necessary and appropriate to switch to lost wax reproduction of the direct metal designs.

Anne Dick does most of the original designs and her workshop completes the process of jewelry making: model making, mold making, casting, hand assembling and finishing.

Adding excitement to working days in the Point Reyes area is living on top of the San Andreas fault. The epicenter of the great 1906 earthquake is just down the road, where fenceposts and trees slid 23 feet out of line.