Sunflower Speedy (Medium)

Sunflowers, scrolls, and checker diamonds in the most beautifully designed hand tooled leather tote in the collection — natural tan and dark brown two-tone hand tooled sunflower and floral scroll border panels surrounding a hand tooled dark brown and natural tan checker diamond center panel, with fully hand tooled shoulder straps that make every inch of this tote a showcase of Western leather artisanship.

This tote bag is the piece that demonstrates most completely what Western hand tooled leather artisanship can achieve when it is given a generous canvas, a complex compositional brief, and the full commitment of a craftsperson who understands both the technical requirements of the tooling tradition and the design principles that make a complex composition work as a unified visual whole. The front face of this tote is organized in the same three-zone composition principle as the checker-and-scroll barrel bag — a geometric center panel flanked by organic tooled border zones — here at the larger scale of the tote format and with the design complexity turned up to the maximum level the format can accommodate. The center panel is a hand tooled checker diamond composition in the dark brown and natural tan two-tone treatment — the geometric diamond grid cut into the leather surface and antiqued so that the alternating diamonds read in the dark brown of the antiqued impressions and the natural tan of the raised leather surface, the checkerboard pattern emerging from the tooling process itself rather than from paint applied after the fact. The border zone surrounding the center panel on all four sides is hand tooled natural tan and dark brown two-tone floral scroll work populated with hand painted sunflower rosette elements — the sunflower being the botanical motif of the Great Plains and the Southwest that appears in the finest Western leather and jewelry work as the flower form most deeply associated with the Western landscape and the Western lifestyle. The sunflowers are painted in the warm golden yellow and dark brown center detail of genuine sunflower color — the hand painting bringing the botanical accuracy of the actual flower into the tooled leather composition with a warmth and naturalism that pure carving cannot achieve. The shoulder straps of this tote are fully hand tooled in the matching floral scroll pattern — the strap tooling extending from the bag body attachment point to the full length of each strap in the complete tooling coverage that makes the straps as much a part of the design as the bag face itself.

Measures : 11” long x 8” deep