Jeannine & Charles McKenzie Jewelry at.....
Jeannine was born in 1945 in Alexandria, Virginia to a career army officer and lived the life of a typical "army brat" moving from state to state and country to country. For over 33 years she lived in a historic 1854 Greek Revival home in the county and raised her family of 5 children.
The creative force on the team, Jeannine has been a jeweler for more than 32 years. She displayed her work on the art show circuit for 11 years from 1974 to 1986, winning numerous awards at some of the finest juried shows in the Midwest, including Milwaukee Lakefront, Chicago's 57th Street, Oak Brook, Oak Park, Michigan's Flint Art Fair, Bronson Park in Kalamazoo, The East Lansing Art Fair and Charlevoix. In Indiana, Talbot Street and Penrod, Ohio's Crosby Gardens and Boston Mills, and in Kentucky, the St. James Court Art Show.
Jeannine began as a watercolorist and painted for a number of years before becoming a designer of jewelry. Although being primarily a self taught artist she is well rounded in her medium as her work is very diverse with delicate mixtures of textures and forms. Through the years her techniques have included casting, electroforming, etching and fabrication. She expresses her feelings about her work in stating, "I've always had a deep love for jewelry and it seemed right for me to express my creative drive to design and make jewelry. To me designing in metal is like playing, it's fun, exciting and adventuresome."
In 1992 Jeannine's husband Charles joined her to form the partnership and they now display and sell their work in over 75 galleries across the United States from Alaska to New York. They are avid outdoors men and enjoy fishing, camping, rock hunting and nature photography.
In 2004, after 10 years of rough camping 4 weeks a year (sleeping in the back of our truck, hauling in water & a potty hole up in the woods) we sold our home, and were able to have a cabin built on our 80 acres of land in a remote wilderness area of Michigan's Upper Peninsula....Wolf, Moose, Black Bear, Bald Eagle, Beaver, Bobcat, and so much more. We only have a cell phone, which is wired to a booster and a hard antenna outside the cabin. The telephone company wanted $4,800 to bring a land line in.
ABOUT OUR WORK: Our earrings are fabricated from sterling silver, copper, brass and bronze. The pearls used in our earrings are all freshwater. The posts and nuts on the earrings are all surgical stainless and hypoallergenic.
THE TECHNIQUES WE USE ARE:
Reticulation - heating the metal until it wrinkles, forming an interesting texture.
Soldering - the joining of metal by use of alloys that flow at a temperature lower than that of the metals being joined.
Stamping - a process by which patterns are made on smooth metal surface with a punch or design stamp.
Forging - the process of forming or shaping metals by the use of hammers along with steel tools.
Marriage of Metals - the soldering of different colored metals together and then finishing the piece as if it were one sheet; showing stripes, checkerboards, etc.
