At Gold & Gems Fine Jewelry, artist & fine jewelry designer Ron Hansen uses his abilities to communicate emotion. "Art is, to me, a creative dimensional expression of feeling, combined with the technical ability to pull it off", Ron said.

A lot of Ron's art medium and style revolve around beauty, love, and feeling good. Ron believes that fine jewelry makes a statement. Often that statement is best described as a celebratory achievement for one's accomplishments.

Ron creates highly customized one-of-a-kind jewelry for his clients by first being a good listener. He listens to his customers? desires and does concept renderings using both freehand sketching and digital technology.

The next step in the process is creating a hand-carved model with preview and style revisions from the client. All of Ron's clients are unique and Ron likes to involve them every step of the way.

Next comes the traditional casting, pouring of molten metal followed by sanding, shaping, filing, finishing, polishing and texturing. It is a time consuming process, and Ron has the patience and craftsmanship to realize attention to detail is crucial.

Finally, the last step is the precision gem setting. The piece is now finished, everything done in house for best value, care and security.

Ron has a real talent for using the customer's old gems to create an exciting, fresh, new piece. One of his recent projects was a piece that was completely transformed. His customer brought in an old ring with a triangular tanzanite, an old ruined gold chain and some miscellaneous small baguette-cut diamonds. After a brief design consultation he gathered that her taste and style had changed a bit. She was drawn towards shiny, white metal and contemporary styling. She really wanted a fine pendant, on a chain. Ron used her gold as partial payment and proceeded to design and create a perfect piece exclusively for her.

Ron has been designing and creating amazing and beautiful fine jewelry this way for more than 25 years. His work has been featured in Gems & Gemology, an international trade magazine and he has assembled a clientele of well known figures in music and sports, including a World Series MVP and a multi-platinum recording artist (names withheld out of respect for their privacy). Ron said, "It gives me a huge sense of pride to be chosen as their personal jeweler when they could buy their jewelry anywhere in

the world."

Ron is accessible to anyone, with his friendly and professional demeanor, he sets everyone instantly at ease. The prices for his custom artistry are

very reasonable.

When you see a piece of fine jewelry that turns your head, it wasn't by accident. It was done by an accomplished jeweler.

Ron Hansen can be reached at Gold & Gems Fine Jewelry, 25 N. Main St., on the Plaza, Ashland, OR and at (541) 488-2753 and on the web at http://www.goldandgems.com.