Tara Feld Design Jewelry is available in store at The Book Jewel.
Since her childhood in Santa Monica, Tara Feld has cultivated an eye for beauty. Throughout her life, she has maintained an intuitive passion for modern design that has informed her jewelry designs and harnessed a creative process of fashioning jewelry through the manipulation of exquisite materials.
Tara is a lifelong bead collector. To this day, her personal bead collection is organized in the same ‘boxed’ method as the Bergers Beads Specialty Co., a clothing and accessories material store, open from 1938-2014. The shop was famous for its floor to ceiling high bookcases brimming with paper boxes of beads, organized by variety and color. This beloved store in the Los Angeles Garment District inspired Tara’s lifelong appreciation of beads from around the world and her fascination with elaborate geometric indigenous beadwork.
Through her growing collection of curated beads, Tara first began designing and creating handmade earrings, as a spontaneous and personal expression that she gifted to loved ones. Tara created her first pair of earrings, when she was just five years old, for her mother.
Tara’s mother, Diana Lipnick-Feld, an artist and docent at The Getty Villa in Malibu, inspired Tara to design jewelry to match the fashion she would wear when attending annual formal dinners. Tara would surprise and delight her mother with a custom jewelry design that complemented her mother’s outfit for the evening. Over the nine years of her mother’s docentship, Tara created a vast collection of bespoke, fashion-inspired earrings for these special events. She then started making and gifting jewelry to other family members and close friends.
Tara’s practice of designing and creating earrings originated from these expressions of unconditional love, and grew into an ongoing joyful craft of hand making unique adornments out of quality materials. Wherever the wearers of her exclusive designs would go, people they encountered would always ask, “Where did you get those gorgeous earrings?" It was the consistent encouragement and appreciation Tara received for her jewelry design that led her to expand her personal passion into a wholesale business, and open her online etsy store: www.etsy.com/shop/tarafelddesign.
Integral to the development of Tara’s skill with raw materials and the creation of her distinctive voice as an artist, were her early exposures to the practices of artmaking. Tara was greatly influenced by her upbringing, acquiring craftsmanship skills from her father, a visionary and resourceful woodworker, and a dedicated fine art studio practice from her mother, a talented artist, sculptor and children’s book author. Tara’s love for art history and culture grew out of yearly travels to visit her grandparents in Paris, and her own aesthetic and personal art making practice was developed further through her fine art education at the California Institute of the Arts.
Launched in 2016, TARA FELD DESIGN | JEWELRY is a culmination of all the facets of Tara as an artist: her eye for art & design, her journey as a lifelong bead collector, and her desire to share the beauty of her cultivated aesthetic through exquisite adornments that can be enjoyed by all.
Tara sees every material and space she works with as a medium with potential. She enjoys the challenge that goes into planning the micro-level architecture, structural design, and problem solving of each jewelry concept, as well as the personal experience of bringing that idea to life within vast collections of color and textures. As a jewelry designer, she finds the experience of witnessing an object's transformation, and later seeing it come to life as an expression of an individual's fashion style very rewarding.
TARA FELD DESIGN | JEWELRY is a supporter of fair trade bead artisans from around the world. Tara’s extensive knowledge and deep appreciation for beads and their history influences how she chooses them for her designs. Tara is always on the hunt for vintage beads and quality beading materials, even if they take years to acquire.
Tara’s aesthetic as a jewelry designer is balanced by both the qualities of modern and classical design, and her vision to highlight beautiful materials as a focal point. She elevates and refines quality beads, pairing them with 14K gold-filled, 24K, rose gold, and sterling silver metals. From concept to completion, Tara skillfully transforms these materials into a clean, luxurious, and lasting piece of wearable art.
As of winter of 2022, this curated collection of modern jewelry created by local jewelry designer Tara Feld is available in store at The Book Jewel. You can also meet Tara at our Mother's Day Trunk Show here at The Book Jewel on Sunday, May 7, 2023 from 10am - 2pm.
Special thanks from Tara Feld
"I would like to give special thanks to:
The Book Jewel, Karen Dial (owner), Sean Moore (manager), Joseph, Lucy, Thera, Aidan, Valentin, Edward, and Paige's (the cat): Thank you all for welcoming me to your lovely independent bookstore community! Thank you to Valentin Zuniga Contreras for taking the time to interview me and collaborate on this thoughtful article.
Your collective encouragement, kindness, assistance and feedback has been wonderful to experience.
Tara's Book Recommendations:
Airport Security with Noonorse by Diana Lipnick-Feld. This book helps parents familiarize their children (ages 2-5) with mandatory airport security requirements before and after boarding a plane. As of Spring 2023, available in paperback and hardback at The Book Jewel. www.feldstudios.com
Bliss Montage by Ling Ma
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu.
The Cabinet by Un-Su Kim.
The Left Hand of Darkness & Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin:
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Maddaddam Trilogy by Margaret Atwood