Eye for design and infinite patience help Murphy McMahon craft award winning pieces.
By John Stang
Published in the Daily Interlake
November 27, 2005
Murphy McMahon’s fingers look thick and beat-up, calloused and scarred. It’s surprising to see how deft and nimble they are.
No hesitation, no fumbling — as they twist, scrape, drill, solder and coax less than a third of an ounce of sterling silver and even less gold into a 3/4-inch-tall penguin with a golden scarf.The penguin is a prototype for a mold of earrings and small pendants.
Dozens of hours went into that prototype.
“It takes a lot of fiddling around and fitting to make everything fit properly so it looks fine. It doesn’t happen very fast,” McMahon said.
McMahon, 56, has been making jewelry for 33 years, taking several years to master the delicate art. He sells his pieces out of Murphy McMahon & Co., located at 735 S. Main St. in Kalispell. It’s a mastery that has led to at least a dozen awards from jewelers associations, including a first place and a third place this year from the Montana/Wyoming Jewelers Association. His is a tiny unforgiving world — viewed via touch and magnifying glasses — split between design and mechanics. Design is where imagination and technical know-how map out a miniature world in the mind and on paper. Mechanics takes the idea and manipulates it into something tangible.
Some jewelry makers are adept at only one — McMahon feels blessed that he can do both. His ideas can pop up instantly or stick with him for years until the right materials and circumstances jell. The spark could be a fascination with a color. Or a mental twitch when looking at a tiny gem. Or something just clicks when thinking about something like penguins.
“He has the ability to look at something and see the end product,” said former employee and longtime customer Sue Pratt.
McMahon loves “ the creative part of it. You start with raw materials and come up with something beautiful. They kind of take on a life of their own. There are pieces on my bench I’ve been fooling around with for 10 years and they’re still not right.” The technical part is tedious. McMahon remembers hiring an apprentice many years ago who never mastered the slow, patient, delicate work — costing him about $20,000 in broken pieces.
“When I first started out, I knew how to do it, except that my hands couldn’t do it. It’s a hands-eyes thing. There’s a feel to the metal. With something so small, you have to get the feel of the metal, when to push, when to stop. That’s something learned through time and repetition. ... I was at the bench for at least 10 years until I felt my pieces had a finished clean look to them,” he said. That finished look goes to the undersides, the backsides, and the infinitesimal nooks and crannies of a jewelry piece — where only experts even think of looking at his work bench, McMahon’s concentration shifts into a higher zone.
“It’s almost a Zen-like process. You do have to focus. You can’t take it lightly,” he said.
Sometimes, McMahon can’t get into that zone, and he puts down that piece and moves up to another project. He routinely makes several pieces simultaneously — working on one while others set or cool or form rubber molds in a vulcanizer. He spends an hour or two on one segment, then moves to another — each gradually evolving over dozens of hours into finished pieces. It took McMahon years before he lost his concern over not finishing a piece in one or two shifts. He can still make mistakes, although his experience helps him cover them. Once, he accidentally knocked a sapphire off a pendant, did some fix-it changes to compensate, and won a first-place jewelry design award in 2000 for the finished project. A fourth-generation Montanan, McMahon is the third generation of his family to be a jeweler. He attended both the University of Montana and Montana State University planning on, but never earning, his degree in architecture. Bored with school, McMahon joined his uncle’s and aunt’s jewelry business in Kalispell as a salesman, and then got hooked on making the jewelry.
“I wasn’t so interested in the selling. But I loved working on the bench,” he said.
McMahon drifted out of being a jeweler a couple of times, working as a salesman and stockbroker. But he still kept a hand in the trade, creating jewelry for specific clients. But he missed the creativity and working with his hands. He returned to jewelry-making full time in 1998, opening up his present shop in Kalispell. McMahon said: “It’s a happy business. The people who come to you are celebrating. After I’m dead and gone, I hope my jewelry will be passed on down from generation to generation.”