One can recognize her by her kind, mischievously twinkling eyes and by the way she laughs. Christa Lühtje is a woman with a positive approach to life. She radiates a hearty warmth and youthful freshness, without any affectations.
She is open and personable, lively and reliable, caring, a wonderful person to talk to, a good friend and, for many, a good teacher.
The fact that she became a goldsmith – and one who can meanwhile look back on over forty years’experience in this profession – is due largely to the influence of her teacher Franz Rickert, under whom she studied at the Munich Academy in the sixties after serving her goldsmith apprenticeship in Hamburg. Rickert was at once a challenge and a guardian, and Christa Lühtje still reveres her former teacher as someone who helped her to come to terms with herself. The training given at the Munich Academy differed greatly from normal practice at that time. It moulded the mind. The history of art opened itself up to her like a hitherto unknown world. Christa Lühtje’s first big journey abroad, in 1961, took her to Greece. But Egypt, in 1968, was more important. Jewellery had a lot to do with the origins of civilization, with the early cultures of the regions of the Middle East and the Mediterranean; the classical and the archaic existed side by side. Jewellery ennobled, symbolized the divine, possessed magical powers of protection, helped its wearers to cross the Acheron. After Greece came the Byzantine Empire, renowned for its great ornamental accomplishments to the glory of God and the saints. Although Christa Lühtje has never worked in enamel herself, she nevertheless recognized a kindred spirit in these early works of ornamental art. She for her part had learnt to use precious metals and stones economically for optimum effect. To this end, surfaces had to be smooth. Heavily scorched or thickly applied, wrinkly materials were not her thing. Like Rickert, she sought what was natural in whatever material she chose – and this chosen material was, from the very beginning, gold.