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Raw Beauty: The Jewelry of Mark Castagnoli
Canadian Diamonds, Fall 2003
Castagnoli's 7th floor office is in Vancouver's business district and has a view of the city's bustling port. Several men's kimberlite rings are sitting on his desk: they're rugged and strong looking, featuring smooth, dark kimberlite surrounded by a band of gold. Castagnoli's collection features fine jewelry made of some of the most unusual and exotic materials on the planet--rough diamonds, fossilized coral, meteorites and even dinosaur bones. It's in this workshop where Castagnoli, a prospector as well as a jewelry designer--pursues his passion for creating jewelry unlike anything else in the marketplace.
"Mark is a cross between a nutty professor and Indiana Jones," says Mike Robuck, the owner of the Alaska Mint in Anchorage. "He loves to get out in field and discover rare items and then he gets back into his workshop and creates the most beautiful pieces, which we sell here in our retail shop."
The mining companies give kimberlite samples from their prospecting explorations to Castagnoli. "To my knowledge, kimberlite has never been used in jewelry before," says the 47-year-old Castagnoli. "I try to incorporate a good piece of garnet or another key mineral. I can inlay a diamond or garnet back into it. There's a great many possibilities."
Castagnoli caters to a niche market and isn't widely known amongst big jewelry industry types, and so far, his experiments with kimberlite are flying under the radar of most of his colleagues. "Nobody knows yet, with the exception of very few people in mining industry," he says.
On the wall behind Castagnoli's desk, there's a painting of a famous Klondike photograph of a miner snoozing, a pickaxe and gold pan at his feet. The painting was done by Castagnoli's mother, a professional artist who sparked his initial interest in jewels and minerals. She took her son out with local rock hound groups looking for minerals. It was on a childhood vacations on British Columbia's Fraser River that he met a character who would influence his life profoundly. Karl Hesse was a short, one-eyed German in his late 70s with a young, attractive wife. He taught the young Castagnoli the basics of digging for gold.
As a teenager, Castagnoli was fascinated with jewels and he was always at the local gem shows, sorting through opals and picking out the best ones. His first after-school job was in the opal business, buying for various investors. He spent his weekends and vacations looking for gold, and after graduation, he headed straight to the Klondike.
"I was actually living the gold rush," he says. "There was no difference between what I was doing and what people were doing during gold rush times."
He had some claims which netted small amounts of gold, but nothing that was very lucrative. He figured he could make more money with a value-added product, so he taught himself goldsmithing and formed Placer Gold Design, specializing in nugget gold jewelry from the Canadian north.
Castagnoli's work features chunks of nugget gold embedded into rings and belt buckles. He focuses on unprocessed, rough looking jewelry for men-a segment of the population that few jewelry manufacturers rarely focus on. He has also created a niche for himself by using the sawn tops of larger diamond crystals. He gets the unprocessed diamond tops from the Ekati mines in the North West Territories, which are normally cut into tiny finished stones of less than half a carat. Instead, he leaves them in pieces which are up to one carat in weight and sets them into rings and earrings.
"The supply of these diamonds is extremely limited because everything is normally cut into finished stones," he says. "It's almost unheard of for people in the trade to see rough gems. Diamond dealers can't get heads around it."
Castagnoli's creations are sold in boutiques in cruise ship ports in Alaska and through dealers on the US mainland.
"Men love his jewelry," says Betty Sue King, who sells Placer Gold Design's jewelry at her wholesale shop in Sausalito, California. "The nugget gold looks solid and substantial. His work is very classic looking."
The California-based diamond seller Mona Lee Nesseth, also sells his work. "His designs are classic but he's always looking for new material," she says. "He's like a miner and he works to get the material himself. He markets materials most people would overlook."
In fact, Castagnoli recently returned from a trip to Alaska in search of an extremely rare ancient gem which he has named Stingray coral. He headed out in a boat with the original discover to an island which doesn't even have a name, located off the coast Prince of Wales Island. Here, on a small 400 million year old beach, he hunted for this rare fossilized coral with its intriguing pattern of tiny black and white circles.
"I found what may be the last piece," he says. "I'm quite satisfied that no one else will come up with any more of this stuff. I may have complete control over a gem material which no one else in the trade has."
He first noticed the coral in the knife handle in an Alaskan gallery and traced it back to the original discoverer. Castagnoli named it Stingray coral because its pattern resembles the skin of a stingray and he figures the moniker will stick because the Smithsonian Institution accepted his sample. He may control the world's supply, but he estimates that's only a few kilos, and only of interest to specialty gem collectors. Castagnoli is using the coral to create some riveting looking men's rings. He also dabbles in jewelry made from dinosaur bones and rare meteorites.
"I have a recognizable name because I can always show jewels something they haven't seen before," he smiles. "And because I know the prospector and the miners, when something new is found I usually get the first look at it."
Castagnoli also has a hand in the gold rush tourism business-and he has plans to create a home-grown "diamond rush" tourism industry as well. Ever wondered who supplies those 100% authentic Klondike gold flakes to Yukon souvenir boutiques? Yes, it's Mark Castagnoli. And if you've ever seen a gold panning demonstration at a tourist mine, chances are, you were looking for Castagnoli's gold.
Now he has a line of "diamond rush jewels" celebrating Canada's rapid expansion in the industry. He had gold maple leaf and pickaxe pendants studded with diamonds, which are aimed at tourists as well as people working in the mining and prospecting industries.
"During the gold rush in California and the Yukon, goldsmiths were commissioned to make gold rush jewels for wealthy miners," Castagnoli says. "I create a number of gold rush pieces and now that the Canadian diamond rush is on, I'll do diamond rush jewels using material from the mines and ideally selling them back to the miners."
He's talking to tourism operators and government officials in Yellowknife about how they can promote diamond tourism.
"The diamond rush has barely scratched surface. There are thousands of potential sites. But unfortunately, so far, none of it is accessible to the general public or tourists."
Castagnoli may not be ready to run a tour bus down the Lupin Ice Road, but he's betting that future discoveries in Ontario and Quebec will provide an opportunity for a more viable form of diamond tourism.
In the meantime, Castagnoli has purchased a historical gold rush site at Yale on the Fraser River, near the location where he first hunted for gold as a child. He plans to run tours from Vancouver which will include 'gold rush food,' all the gold you can dig, and of course, a gallery displaying Placer Gold Design's jewelry.
But never one to stay on one task for long, Castagnoli already has his eyes on the recent emerald discoveries in the Yukon. "There's a great potential for fine emerald in the Yukon," he says. "If we have a miniature emerald rush, I'm sure I'll be creating some jewelry to go with it."