Award winning gem artist Naomi Sarna is no stranger to the headlines. Just a few years ago, in 2020, she made news after being awarded a Guinness World Record for her Tanzanite carving/sculpture, L’Heure Bleu (The Blue Hour), which weighed in at a record-breaking 703.4 carats (140.68 g). You can read more about that in the Roskin Gem News Report, HERE. Currently, she’s in the New York Times, featured in a career story by Times Fashion Editor Felicia Craddock. The intro can be read here. Follow the link below to the New York Times Fashion page.
with a carving of a 703-carat blue-violet tanzanite
set on a sterling silver base that is named L’Heure Bleu.
Photo Credit…Jeremy Bittermann for The New York Times
Carving Gems Is This Jeweler’s Passion
Recently, Naomi Sarna has been working on a grapefruit-size sculpture
of a Siamese fighting fish, coaxing it from a piece of blue chalcedony.
by Felicia Craddock
Jade from the Kunlun Mountains in western China, a rough topaz the size of a cantaloupe, a hefty quartz crystal and a piece of brilliant green and white jadeite from Guatemala. During a phone interview from her Portland, Ore., home in December, Naomi Sarna listed just a few of the gems and minerals that were on windowsills, in glass cases and sitting on the floor beneath her desk.
“I’m always surrounded by my stones,” said Ms. Sarna, a jewelry artist and gem carver whose collection of several hundred pieces, kept in her homes in New York City and Portland, was gathered during visits to mines around the world. “I have to see pieces to get to know them and become excited about their potential.”
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Tap here to read the full story in the New York Times.
To learn more about the artist, tap here to reach Sarna’s website.
