Daniel

One day, while shopping for jewelry materials in the center of Santiago de Chile, my favorite stone vendor asked me who I took classes with. He followed by saying: “Daniel Waisberg is the best teacher in Santiago. I’ve seen the work of his students and it’s fantastic”.

I googled Daniel’s information and gave him a call. We spoke. We clicked. Twenty minutes later, I was sitting at his office (www.academiayjoyas). He explained the program. The following day was my first class.

Do you know how fascinating it is to create your first piece of silver? To see how solid silver and copper pellets fuse together in the presence of heat, transforming into a liquid, is pretty impressive. All of a sudden you observe Newton’s Law of Conservation of Energy (“Energy can not be created nor destroyed; it transforms from one form to another”) right before your eyes. I thought to myself, “If this is true, then all the positive energy I’m putting into my work, will be transmitted to my jewelry.”

Daniel taught me all there was to know about jewelry making (the way it’s made in Chile). He had a program set up with certain prototype rings for all his students, which I constantly wanted to modify making them harder and more intricate. When it came to my first “free design project”, he told me: “Liz, you’re crazy. But you are very talented and I know you’ll succeed.” He was the first person who believed in me and I’ll remember that till the day I die.