Crystalline salts nurture the emerald flame Kristen Bates needs to forge her silver rings during a jewelry class at Allan Hancock College.
“They’re very comfortable,” said the Santa Maria resident, whose rustic, hammered rings occupy a few of her own fingers. “I spend a lot of time on the tool bench making sure they’re all really comfortable.”
Before Bates transferred to Chico State, where she graduated with an art degree in 2004, Hancock was where her college days began. A full-time marketing coordinator, Bates runs on a schedule split between designing copy for the orthodontics office she works for and creating her own jewelry and visual art that she occasionally sells on the side.
She has a few upcoming in-person sales on the books in Solvang (Nov. 8 and 9 at the Elverhoj Museum of History and Art and Nov. 23 at Bethania Lutheran Church), which will include several rings, earrings, and sketches Bates completed within the past two months.
All of Bates’ silver wares and art prints that will be available for purchase stem from two community courses she is currently enrolled in at Hancock—the aforementioned jewelry class and a botanical illustration course.
The latter class has been helping Bates brush up on a third semi-related subject, she explained.
“I’m learning Latin while I’m doing this. It’s so fun,” Bates said with a laugh.
She names each of her botanical illustrations after the subject’s genus and species in Latin. One of her mandrake sketches, for example, is titled Mandragora officinarum.
“It’s a mandrake, you know? Like in Harry Potter,” said Bates, who took a Hogwarts house sorting quiz a while ago but doesn’t recall the results. “I think I was either Hufflepuff or Ravenclaw.”
Mandrakes are the only of Bates’ subjects fabled to shriek when they’re uprooted, thanks to centuries of folklore surrounding the nightshade. But they’re just one of several poisonous plant varieties she was drawn to when deciding on what reference photos to sketch from.
“I just picked the first ones that caught my eye. … I didn’t know they were poisonous,” said Bates, whose other poisonous subjects include belladonnas and Chinese lantern plants.
Bates’ poison picks aren’t always harmful to humans, however, she explained after flipping through pages of her sketch book and landing on Amianthium muscitoxicum.
“It’s a fly poison plant,” Bates said. “It only kills flies. Not us.”
There are plenty of non-poisonous plant sketches featured in Bates’ upcoming art sales as well. When working with those varieties, she’ll try to get her hands on plant specimens to illustrate from wherever they’re attainable.
“I prefer drawing from real references, but the photo will do when I can’t get the real thing,” Bates said. “I try to use actual specimens as much as possible.”
Bates has based some of her past sketches on flowers she’s picked up from the Solvang Farmers Market, and others on various kinds of flora she’s spotted during walks near her home in Santa Maria.
Prior to taking Hancock College’s botanical illustration class, Bates had experience working with flowers in a different way, during her part-time gig as a floral shop assistant at Renae’s Bouquet in Santa Ynez.
“It was like walking into a potpourri,” Bates said to describe a typical day at the store.
Bates also previously worked at a jewelry shop in Los Olivos years before signing up for jewelry crafting and silver casting classes at Hancock College. Besides the Hancock connection, Bates’ silver rings and earrings share a thematic tie with her botanical illustrations, as she draws most of them on gray sketch sheets.
“Working on the gray paper is still my favorite,” said Bates, whose upcoming sales will include several of her gray art prints, and some originals as well.
“I really don’t mind parting with originals once in a while,” the artist said, “because I know I can make more.”
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This article appears in Nov 7-17, 2024.