FASHION : Designer’s Tiny Medals Draw on Nature, Fantasy : Adriana Rappaport says she’s never inspired, but just keeps on working until the precise jewelry form emerges.

In a small workshop in the greening hills above Ojai, Adriana Rappaport holds a thumbnail-size circle of wax, and considers a starfish-like figure on its surface. She has carved the design with tools sharp enough for surgery.

But it falls short of her ideal, and is tossed aside, destined for meltdown.

“That’s not quite it,” says the artist, whose workbench is piled with medallions cast from happier sessions with the wax.

The tiny medals have been formed by molten silver, in shapes drawn from nature or fantasy. They range from motifs of Oriental simplicity to intricate snowflake-like designs and are used in creating earrings and necklaces. One motif the artist identifies as a pomegranate, a fruit that grows with vigor on the land.

In spite of their size, the sculptures are commanding. Their filigree work is fine, almost ethereal, the details precise. Some are trimmed with pearls barely larger than a pinhead. Earrings are carved on both sides.

The lost wax method that produced them is engaging to Rappaport, who has designed in tile, ebony, leather and metal fabrication. She calls the wax technique a basic workshop craft, one she adopted at the turn of the decade, when restraint came to culture, to fashion--and to her.

On the walls of the studio is a gallery of a bolder past.

The contrast in design is like night and day, or perhaps a sun and a moon period. Here are great kaleidoscopic bronze and copper pieces that look like treasure from buried chests--metal adorned with coins, chains and multicolored stones, heavy jeweled cuffs and grapefruit-sized belt buckles.

“I was the epitome of the ‘80s,” says the artist wryly, “flashy, garish, opulent.”

The period brought demand from upscale boutiques on Rodeo Drive and the San Fernando Valley. Rappaport could hardly keep up with orders, and hired assistants to help complete enough belts.

“A belt went for 150 bucks, and a store in Encino would sell it for $450. Those days are gone.” Anyway, she says, “I’m in another kind of space now, living a simpler life.”

The path to Ojai and simplicity was not short. It began in her native Buenos Aires, where she was expelled from architecture school for political activism.

“I am sure, had I stayed there I would not be alive today,” she says.

She went to London, where she did architectural drafting, then to Ibiza, off the coast of Spain (“where all the hippies went”), and to Santa Barbara to engage in routine work with the renowned Pandolfi, before settling here in the countryside a decade ago.

She is married and has three children--the youngest a 4-year old--and she finds family life as important as art.

Lately she has concentrated on work in the studio, leaving marketing to a professional sales representative. The rep, Shirley de Marco of Long Beach, says the pieces are easy to place because their creator “puts so much of herself into them.”

As before, the designs are in demand, now in more classic venues. Several museums are showing them, including the prestigious Laguna Museum of Art, as well as shops such as Objects in Montecito and Silk ‘N Spice in Ventura.

This is rewarding to Rappaport, and it points to the next logical step for her art: outlets in New York. She contemplates this frontier, but so far her own ideals have kept her from crossing it. At her work table, she picks up a recent design, a pair of half-inch human torsos, one male, one female.

She is fond of them, but: “The man came out just a little smaller because of shrinkage, so it looks like the woman is a great Amazon thing,” she says, lining up a nearly symmetrical pair for earrings.

These and other pieces are ready for finish work--burnishing, antiquing, the adding of pearls or bits of shell. All of this Rappaport does herself. She likes being immersed in the process rather than having production workers--but it steals time from creativity.

Inventing a design might take hours or weeks of effort before she resolves to cast a piece. Such labor takes momentum, and faith.

“I am never inspired,” she says, “But I have a lot of work ethic. I just work, and then something happens, and you take off in a certain direction.”

She describes a mystery that many artists have told before, but laymen always question.

“I just let the wax speak--you know?” she says. “The wax has its thing; it’s a matter of slowing down enough to look.”