It would be far from the truth to say that becoming a goldsmith and enamel artist at the age of 43 was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. It wasn’t. For many years, it never even crossed my mind to do anything different from the profession I chose when I was 20. Since then, I had been working in law enforcement, a career through which I saw many shades of the world and human nature… and I didn’t like what I saw.
I had to face the fact that my job only exposed me to parts of life that most people would never want to encounter. Yet I always loved looking at the world with a childlike gaze, seeing things as pure and good—even when they weren’t. I couldn’t allow that outlook to be completely destroyed within me.
I needed to step into the colorful side of life, or my soul would break.
In 2017, my life took a sharp turn when a change in my work schedule suddenly gave me more free time. No one in my family had ever been a goldsmith, or even worked in crafts, and I hadn’t either—apart from some teenage experiments making horsehair jewelry. So, when one July morning over coffee Harri suggested I should try enameling, I only nodded hesitantly. If someone had told me then that in four years I would earn a goldsmith’s qualification, and a year later give up my career and my hard-earned lieutenant’s rank, I would have laughed and said: impossible.
I began teaching myself through YouTube videos, slowly, color by color, building knowledge from my mistakes and discarded pieces. In 2018 I signed up for jeweler-artist Ferenc Nagy’s enamel course, where my world burst into radiant colors and opened wide. Alongside basic goldsmithing techniques, I learned cloisonné, champlevé, and plique-à-jour. A year later I decided to take the next step and applied to the Budapest Crafts Vocational School (“the Práter”), where I completed a two-year program and earned my official goldsmith certification. Since then, I can also create jewelry from precious metals.
There is something liberating in the self-expression of transforming metal and glass with my own two hands into the brilliant, colorful jewelry I imagine. This inner creative process has become a passion in which I finally feel at home.
