Rock Star
Some folks haul out snapshots. Artist Cathy Waterman prefers another route. “This is my birthday bracelet,” she says, draping an achingly delicate platinum bracelet covered with diamonds and Burmese rubies across her visitor’s wrist. Next: a gold cuff festooned with diamond acorns. “An early piece,” she says, regarding it with the fondness that comes from putting a little bit of herself into each creation.
“Sometimes I sound like Shirley MacLaine,” she confesses. “But I very strongly believe in more than one life. Karma. Everything has meaning. You’re not going to say, ‘This piece has five parts to it and represents the five people in [Cathy Waterman’s] family. But it’s there. And it creates a spiritual and emotional connection. When people wear it, they feel beautiful.”
Schooled as an attorney, Waterman spent several years developing film projects and designing clothes before turning her attention to creating the pieces laid out on her desk. If her work has the capacity to surprise--who would be brave enough to string emeralds and turquoise beads together for a lariat necklace that shimmers like the Aegean?--it may be because the Los Angeles native doesn’t practice the predictable. “For years I had an unlisted number,” she says, absently arranging a group of tiny stones into rows and circles. “A lot of people who knew me didn’t know what I did, and still people found me. At Oscar time, I don’t call anyone. They come, have something to eat. And it all works out.”
Those who heed the good karma of Waterman’s work include Gwyneth Paltrow, Meg Ryan and Demi Moore. (Her pieces are available through Barneys New York, Neiman Marcus and Savannah in Santa Monica.) And when the celebs find her at Oscar time, she never tells them what to wear. “It’s not my place,” she says, “and besides, I’m bossy enough without doing that.”
Unwilling to set her clock by a couture calendar, Waterman designs for her own two seasons: her New Year’s Eve birthday and the Academy Awards. The work itself blends Byzantine art--early church history was her emphasis as an undergraduate--with what Waterman sees every day outside her studio windows: rose bushes, fog, citrus trees. “I’m always sketching. I see things across the room and assume them to be a certain way, then when I get up close it’s not at all what I thought.” In Waterman’s world, twigs of gold circle around the finger. The fire of platinum and pave diamonds is set against a bracelet’s cool outline of ferns, created as “reverso” cut-outs, so that each leaf is a tiny window onto the wearer’s skin. For earrings, tasseled rubies are enrobed by a spider web of platinum and diamonds.
But three kids, not diamonds, are the center of Waterman’s life. “After I had kids, I thought, have I created the most beautiful thing I’ll ever do?” A few minutes later, her teenage son walks in. Work stops. Indeed, his smile is disarming. “Even though they’re older, I still put them to bed every night and wake up each one every morning,” she says, reluctantly acknowledging that someday her children--like her jewelry--will go off to live their own lives.
