agate translucency
I have always been fascinated by the beautiful natural art that is captured in polished slices of Agate. Some Agates are opaque and beautifully banded, whilst others are translucent in thin slices, occasionally some react in strange ways to transmitted light.
Stunningly beautiful natural Agates have a magical charm of their own, all the pictures ...
Fast buy this issue with Paypal
that accompany this article are of naturally coloured Agates; no garish dyes to diminish their beauty, the pictures were all taken in full natural sunlight. Many of the specimens are illuminated from behind, just like stained glass windows, capturing their incredible translucency and inner glow of Nature’s aesthetic magic.
The vast majority of Agates, amazing as it may seem, were actually formed more than 65 million years ago, even before Dinosaurs last walked the Earth. The dull, rocky exterior of an Agate holds hidden within it a vision of spectacular beauty just awaiting our incredulous gaze when polishing reveals all.
Agates are born from within the “fires of the earth”, trapped inside the gas bubbles in Lava from Volcanoes in the cooling molten rock of a creative Volcanic eruption. The cavities in the new rock then attract warm circulating fluids which bubble and churn, even long after the rock has cooled to below 50 c. A silica-rich gel exists in a state of flux, through Scientific Experiments it has been discovered that a viscous fluid appears in what is called a colloid, this material then converts to a solid crystalline form. This produces the incredibly detailed patterned Agate and as it dose so the resulting stone reveals the magical surrealist scenes found within once it has been polished for use in pendants for jewellery.
Strange Boiling vistas
In one of the examples illustrated, tiny bubbles can be seen floating within a fiery coloured Agate shell, very suggestive of a boiling fluid, very strange in appearance and now turned into a solid translucent Chalcedony that we call Agate.
Some features created in an Agates growth phase will survive, frozen forever in time; sheer aesthetic beauty. The feelings are enhanced by the red glow of this Snowball Agate which is only 35mm across.
Swirling Clouds
When I look at these natural creations I marvel at their unique beauty and individuality. These scenes’ can never be matched, even by the most skilled of artists. Imagine yourself floating inside this Agate wonderland, surrounded by thousands of tiny oxide spots, holding all the wonder found in some distant gas clouds out there in space, we see similar natural visions using the powerful Hubble space telescope for example.
See the glowing gas clouds swirl around under gravitational attraction, some forming new suns and planets, in Agates we can see these in miniature. The very same magic of natural creation, but on a much smaller scale, gives rise to these mesmerising natural thin slices of Agate.
Seemingly hot swirling gas clouds held in miniature beauty seem to gather together within the natural translucent Chalcedony.
Scenic Agate
Fantastic shapes, looking just like the high level clouds at sunset seem to be captured in another solid Agate rock-slice, a moment of creation captured again in miniature form.
Looking at these vistas before you, it is easy to imagine yourself in the vastness of the open outdoors, sitting under a crisp autumn sky on a quiet evening. Sometimes, Agates like these display a vista that is then mounted within a dark black picture frame and these pendants are known in the trade as intarsia.
Banded Agate
Nature’s art in another example Illustrated here depicts a very distinctive lined pattern that is marked out in small dots of iron oxide preservation, creating an image like a pointillist painter’s picture. Hauntingly beautiful in its simplicity yet exact in form, giving a three dimensional feel to the subject, a true wonder of Nature in all her spectacular majesty, for more details of other Agate slices, see the booklet that is advertised in this magazine.
Fast buy this issue with Paypal
