About Patricio Ferreira

I began my career as an artist almost 50 years ago in my native country of Chile. Although I worked in many mediums as a young man, jewelry soon became my passion. My aim is to create unique yet wearable pieces of jewelry utilizing high-quality, unusual stones and unusual combinations of stones, both precious and semi-precious.

I am largely self-taught, and over the years I have experimented with and learned many different techniques.  I currently use both “lost wax” and hand-fabrication to create each of my one-of-a-kind pieces. (About the Process )

My career as an artisan has had some interesting twists and turns.  As a young man working in inexpensive metals in Chile, I took a temporary break from that to work in the Greek Merchant Navy for a few years – that’s where our former name, Blue Sun Jewelry, came from.

After leaving the ships, I took my artisanal skills to Madrid, Spain where I lived for a number of years, working primarily in silver at that time.  It was there that I met Neena, a crazy American backpacking through Europe with her cousin.  She ended up moving to Spain, where she worked in an English Language Academy, and after about a year, we moved to Balneario Camboriu, in the south of Brazil.

We intended to stay only about three months but ended up staying 12 years (true story!), before finally moving to Orlando in 2002. That’s when I discovered the Fine Art and Craft shows here in the United States as an avenue to exhibit and sell my work and began working in gold.

Although many jewelers today have opted to use computer-assisted methods to design and make their jewelry, I choose to use a time-tested artisan approach:  I start with an idea, grab my pencil and pad to sketch, and then figure out what will be the best way to get what’s on paper into the metal. And for me, there’s nothing quite like the thrill of seeing the beautiful, completed piece once that idea has completely come to fruition.