In jewelry, the creative spark travels from designer to model-maker to jeweler.

By the end of this road, the spark is often extinguished.

Not in ARK’s studios. Rena and Toly, who have passionately studied millennia of technique and tradition,

exist in a world in which the materials have no boundary.

ARK, founded in 1982 by Anatoly and Rena Krishtul,

joins the ranks of the world’s great jewelers.

Long the go-to for owners of shattered Faberge malachite and Tokyo glass collectors recovering from an earthquake,

the Krishtuls have quietly turned their technical arsenal toward the creation of exquisite jewelry.

Their signature pieces are sculptures in the round, which marry different art-historical traditions and serve not only as adornments

but also as deeply personal objets de vertu. The foray into jewelry began with a shawl pin.

A golden hand holding a fishing rod, angling for its catch, caught Rena’s eye in a museum in Madrid.

Barred from photographing the piece, she sketched it, and brought her rendering to several jewelers.

Each asked, “Which part of this pin would you like us to make?”

“All of it,” Rena answered, and she was told that this was impossible.

Toly, who was an engineer, and Rena, who was tracked through Communist Russia’s rigorous program for identifying and developing artistic talent,

questioned why effects that had been accomplished in the seventeenth century had not endured into the twenty-first. “We know how to learn,” says Rena.

After acquiring some jewelers tools and reading several books on metal smithing, they went to work.

The first time it was worn, the shawl pin sold. In the matching earrings, a fish, its scales hand-beaten so as to flutter convincingly,

“catches” a fly mounted at the ear. The “air bubbles” are supplied by an almost imperceptibly thin chain with diamond rivulets.

Resurrecting pieces that had withstood centuries, Krishtuls developed an encyclopedic mastery of the history of decorative arts,

and they came to question the materials and techniques used in modern fabrication. In a pin/sculpture they call “The Metamorphosis,”

collectors will recognize the Magot, a figure born of seventeenth-century fascination with the Far East.

In the figure’s most popular manifestation, one still produced for export today, the head and arms bob on an internal spring-loaded armature.

In “The Metamorphosis” Rena has added a ruby tongue. The jewel also draws on the Krishtuls’ work on 2500-year-old

Chinese bronze in which the silver was not soldered, but beaten, into a dovetailed groove. To achieve the effect of embroidery on the

Magot’s costume, Rena incised grooves in a gold coat etched to look like silk. She then inlaid the coat with diamond and opal butterflies backed in silver. 

ARK Jewelry Design Luxury Fine Art Handcrafted Bespoke Jewelry High Fashion Haute Couture By ARK Design.