Keeping alive a dying art
BROOKSVILLE –
Stars, fans, rainbows, waterfalls. With a good eye and a little imagination, there’s a lot the beholder can see in one of Wesley Crail’s gem stones.
Crail, 87, of Spring Hill, is among the few keeping alive the dying art of custom gem cutting.
The retired steel worker and gunsmith calls himself a lapidarist – an expert on precious stones and the art of cutting and polishing them.
The Leechburg, Pa., native began cutting gems in 1988.
‘It’s a shame there aren’t more of us,” he says. “I have tried to help other people (get into the business). I have no secrets.”
Though Crail claims to cut precious stones for a hobby, Sean Hagan, who makes custom jewelry and sells it at his store in Brooksville, said Crail is tops in his profession and gets “color out of stones that nobody can. You don’t see his depth in a commercially cut stone like you do in Wesley’s.”
Hagan, aka Jewelerman, has owned his store near Applebees for nearly three years.
He and Crail met in 1997 while they were both working at a different store.
But contrary to what Crail may say, the two men do have one secret.
Together, they came up with a technique they call “stone fusion” in which they seamlessly fuse two or more stones together to form one piece.
“It’s a secret that will never be told,” said Hagan.
One example of stone fusion is a piece Crail calls the “Holocaust stone.” He cut a Star of David into a larger, clear stone and then fused a smaller, red stone at the bottom that represents a drop of blood. Hagan said he is the only the jeweler who can mount Crail’s fused stones. Otherwise, they could break.
Crail doesn’t cut diamonds, but he pretty much cuts every other kind of gem: Emerald, topaz, quartz, aquamarine, amethyst, sapphire and synthetic stones.
His favorite is a 66.5 carat topaz he said took two weeks to cut.
“It’s my pride and joy,” said the energetic craftsman.
Hagan thinks part of the reason there aren’t many gem cutters left in the world is because most people nowadays just don’t have the patience to do work that is so detailed and precise.
“I know I couldn’t do it,” said Hagan, who as a custom jeweler needs more patience than most.
Crail says he got interested in gem cutting soon after he and his wife returned from a trip to North Carolina. While on the trip, the couple had picked out two stones to have set in rings. But when they got the rings several weeks later, he noticed the stones were different than the ones they had picked out.
Even though it may have been a bit of a bait and switch on the part of the jeweler, things actually worked out OK.
“They were better quality than the stones we picked out, those stones had fractures,” Crail said.
Crail said he then heard about a man in New Port Richey who taught lapidary, so he decided to take a lesson.
“It took me two afternoons to cut one stone and I never went back,” Crail said. “The rest of my experience I did on my own through trial and error. That’s how you gain experience. I have ways of polishing that I have never read in any books and I have passed that knowledge on to other people.”
Crail said he has cut hundreds of stones over the years.
Many of the cut gems are on sale at the Jewelerman store. The store’s phone number is 352-544-8422.
For anyone interested in learning gem cutting, Crail recommends a school in Georgia where he taught two-week classes in four separate years.
The William Holland School of the Lapidary Arts is located in Young Harris, Ga., and the Web site is www.lapidaryschool.org.
Among his former students, Crail said, was the dean of the University of Tennessee and a lawyer from Israel.
Community news editor Timothy P. Howsare can be reached at 352-544-5284 or [email protected].
