Meet L.j. Szumylo | Jeweler/Mountain Woman

We had the good fortune of connecting with L.j. Szumylo and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi L.J., have there been any changes in how you think about work-life balance?
Jewelry making is my part-time retirement career/hobby. I fashion pieces for myself, which satisfies my own creative urges, and, on the small-scale entrepreneurial side, I generally design custom works for clients who have ordered a piece after finding me on Facebook or Instagram or who have struck up a conversation with me over a piece that I’ve worn to run errands in town and who have consequently asked me to design something for them.

My full-time career for 29 years was teaching world languages to high school students. As any public school teacher will tell you, it’s a career whose demands make a healthy work/life balance exceedingly difficult to maintain. On workdays I left my house at 5 a.m. and got home at 5 p.m., sometimes later. I worked evenings and weekends, I spent chunks of my summer breaks either creating curricula for new courses or making changes to the courses that I already taught. When I retired in 2021 I think I did nothing but lie on the sofa with my dogs all around me for several months while my husband and I watched t.v. . I was exhausted! No, I was beyond exhausted. It was most definitely long past time to slow down and have more “life” in my work/life balance.

Back in the 1980s, when I still lived in the Midwest, I fell in love with Native American jewelry, especially Navajo work, during summers spent climbing mountains and roaming through tourist shops and galleries in small mountain towns across Colorado. Metalsmithing and creating my own jewelry became one of my life dreams, but it was one that fell by the wayside for many years, due to the demands of teaching and my commitment to excel at my job. I took beginners’ jewelry making classes after work for several months when I was in my early thirties, but when the instructor closed shop, I felt as though I had neither the time nor the resources to continue on my own. Fast forward several decades, post teaching career, and I was now making more time for family, for walks with my dogs, for hikes in the mountains, horseback riding, reading, playing piano, … and yes, more lying on the sofa sometimes doing absolutely nothing at all! I also started collecting the tools that I would need to return to smithing and jewelry-making.

As I began creating jewelry, friends often asked how I was going to turn this into my new, full-time career. What was I doing, they wanted to know, to make it bigger, to advertise myself, to open an online shop or some such thing, to procure myself a booth at all the summer arts and craft shows around town? Two years ago an artist friend offered to share her studio space with me one weekend for a home-studio-tour-type art event. It was early days in my smithing adventure, so I didn’t have a vast number of pieces to sell. But I was determined to put myself out there and dive into the opportunity. Take a chance! Try something new!! The result was that I spent five weeks working twelve hour days, seven days a week in an effort to create a reasonable amount of “stock” to bring to the show and sale. Piano lessons were on hold, as were day-long hiking trips in the high country and outings with my husband. In the end I was left with the feeling that I was doing something akin to being back at my school job, putting off soul-enriching activities, time with family and friends, quiet moments to just enjoy the autumn weather, all for the sake of work. At the same time, the craft that I love so much and approach with so much enthusiasm started to turn into something that felt like drudge work, rather than the stimulating, challenging, creative adventure that it had been.

These days, when I’m not making jewelry for myself or a specific client, I occasionally make and set aside something “to sell somewhere down the road”. So if an event like the artists’ home studio tour in Colorado Springs is resurrected at some point (it’s rather on hold at the moment) and if I have made enough of those “somewhere down the road” pieces to fill up my display case sufficiently, I will undoubtedly give it another go. But I am also content to continue with my current life/work balance – one where life comes before work, not the other way around – creating and selling my art on a smaller scale.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I’m a native Midwesterner who fell in love with the Colorado Rockies as a small child during family vacations at Holzwarth’s Neversummer Ranch in the Kawuneeche Valley on the western side of Rocky Mountain National Park in the 1960’s and early 70’s. In my twenties, I began taking solo summer vacations to Colorado, camping in the back of my mother’s borrowed station wagon and climbing up and down mountains across the state. In 1989 I moved to Colorado and got my teaching certificate from UNC.

I have always been an admirer of art of all kinds, so living in the southwest, I naturally fell in love with Native American jewelry, especially the traditional mid-twentieth century Navajo style. Trips to places like Allens Park, Estes Park, Grand Lake, Durango, Cortez and Silverton always included (and still do) stops at every Indian arts gallery in town, even if it was only to ooh and ahh (and these days, to visit old friends). After completing my student teaching in Cortez, I worked there for a summer in a small Indian arts gallery in the middle of town.

My teaching career began in Colorado Springs in 1992 and I soon discovered that one could take smithing lessons from a man who owned a jewelry supply store in Manitou Springs, so I signed up. Unfortunately, he closed shop a number of months later and I didn’t have the means to buy all of the equipment I would need to continue on my own, so jewelry making went back to being one of those “someday” dreams for me.

Fast forward to retirement a few years ago and to the discovery that all of my Indian arts gallery owner friends in the towns around Rocky Mountain National Park send their damaged “old pawn” pieces for repairs to an extremely kind, generous and helpful gold- and silversmith who just happens to live 5 miles from me these days, and suddenly I had a new mentor, who answers all my smithing questions and tells me about all of the equipment that I should get next (I think that “You’ve got to get you one of these!” is his favorite sentence). So I slowly started buying the tools that I would need and began making jewelry as my retirement hobby.

I think of my style as “Navajo meets art nouveau”. I call it “Nava-Nouveau influenced” design. If my art is unique, I would say that this pairing of influences is partially responsible for that unique quality. My nature-loving soul has always been drawn to the flowing leaf, flower and vine motifs of Art Nouveau, while life in the Southwest has, as already mentioned, given me a love for Native American design. Although I’m a 100% white woman of European descent, I use a lot of Native American techniques and tools in my work. One will often see traditional stamps included in my designs. I solder with acetylene, using an ancient Prest-O-Lite torch and regulator. My stamping surface is an old tree stump. My pieces tend to include design elements of Native American jewelry such as raindrops, cactus buttons, leaves and fans, half round and twisted wire to “frame the composition”. Turquoise is one of my favorite stones, although, with so many mines closed and supplies coming from old “stashes”, prices can be prohibitive, so I also use a lot of jaspers and agates in my designs. My pieces are on the larger side, no itsy bitsy baby jewelry unless a customer requests it.

Big, bold jewelry indeed. During my years as a high school teacher, I was known for my habit of wearing my collection of Navajo squash blossom necklaces and beefy Navajo cuffs to work on a daily basis. I believe that this is also part of what makes my jewelry unique in the marketplace. I went into this art form first and foremost as a creative outlet, not as a potential business, so from the beginning I created what I liked, not what research and well-intentioned advice from others told me might be commercially most popular. “If you would make smaller things, more people would buy them” is something that I’ve heard more than a few times, but if I did that, I wouldn’t be doing me. As I say, if a customer requests it, I am open to crafting smaller pieces, but if it’s just me at home staring at some lovely cabochons, I’m undoubtedly going to group several of them together and design a fairly large silver world for them to live in.

Growing up, I was constantly drawing with a standard old number two pencil. Design meant thinking in 2D, so, depicting shape and shading. Jewelry, being a 3D art, has brought me to consider the following elements when I begin designing a new piece, even if I can’t ultimately always incorporate all four very well:

1. Color (which is why I almost always include at least one stone in anything that I make)
2. Shape
3. Texture (I have over 100 stamps that I use to add to my designs)
4. Depth (When I can, I curve and bend my sterling silver elements so that they rise above the background, and I use different thicknesses of silver and layering of shapes to create depth)

As to what I am proud of and excited about in regards to my art, I would have to say that I am proud of the care that I take with each and every piece that I make. Nothing ever comes out 100% perfect, my creations are all handmade, they all lack machine-made precision. But I take the time to make each one the best that I, as an imperfect artist, can make it. Patience has become my mantra. I never rush to “get it done”, if slowing down will make a piece that much better.

There are two aspects of my process that most excite me. First, I’m always trying to make new designs and to experiment with new techniques. I sometimes stall midway through a piece, because I’ve decided to try to do something that I haven’t done before and I’m afraid that it might do something like melt into a molten puddle of disaster. But eventually I take a deep breath and dive in. The excitement comes when my idea actually works. Second, with every piece that I create, the work goes through stages, from an initial drawing to the finished product. In between those two are points where everything looks like a mess, generally after the fourth or fifth dipping in pickle (acid) to clean off the scale and gunk that accumulate on the silver during solderings. So when I reach the last step, setting the stones into their bezels, and I get to see the piece finally become what I had first imagined in my head, it’s always an exciting moment for me.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
I’m not a city woman or someone who dines out, so when friends come to visit, my husband and I prefer to take them out to the mountains, be it in the Colorado Springs area, or farther north and west to the Collegiate Peaks or the mountains along the I-70 corridor.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
I would give a shoutout to the countless incredible Native American jewelers who have inspired me with their beautiful work to want to make jewelry of my own. Hugs and kisses to my wonderful husband, who puts up with all the sawing and stamping and filing and drilling and torching that has a tendency to take over half the house. And to my sister Debbie…. there are no words to express how much she means to me, but I would be lost without her.

Instagram: lj.burnett2

Facebook: Laura Szumylo Burnett

Other: nava.nouveau.ljs@gmail.com

Image Credits
Photographs of my work were taken by myself. Credit to my husband for shooting my portrait.