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“I
like to challenge myself to make my beads look old, like stone
or wood or bone,“ says Galardy. Many of his beads resemble
old ivory: his dewdrops, fumed swirls, and fritter beads are
shown above. Photo © Donna H. Chiarelli photography. |
NASCENT CREATIVITY. “When
I was young, I had only a passing interest in art, and was much
more involved in sports,” says Galardy, whose dark brown curly
hair and beard and brown eyes speak clearly of his Italian heritage.
“But my mother, Kathryn, dabbled in various art forms, painting,
quilting, and sewing, and I guess I inherited some of her artistic
talent.”
With an entirely different career in mind, Galardy stayed in the
city where he grew up to study electrical engineering at the University
of Pittsburgh, then moved to west Texas to work in the oil fields
after graduating in 1981. “Then 15 months later, the oil business
dried up, so I moved to southern California to try and find work,”
he said.
He took a job testing equipment for a leasing firm in Los Angeles,
and four years later was transferred to San Francisco, where he
stayed with the firm another five years. It was there that he “hooked
up” with his wife, Kim Wertz, whom he knew from college; she
was a business major. The two met again in San Francisco in 1985,
and married shortly thereafter. “But by the late '80s the crowds
and the fast pace of life there were getting to be too much for
me,” says Galardy. The two set off together on their artistic
renewal; today Galardy and Wertz share a studio, working side by
side, making lampworked beads.
“We began frequenting the Berkeley flea market, and I was
fascinated by the glass African trade beads I saw for sale and on
people there,” he said. “I began collecting them, and
that was the start of my dabbling in beads.” Galardy and Wertz
decided to get out of the Bay area, and in 1988, while looking around
for a new place to live, drove north along the coast through Arcata,
an old Victorian lumber town with a population of roughly 8,000
people about 270 miles north of San Francisco.
“It's a town with a progressive local government, and we thought
they might take to a bead store opening there,” Galardy recalls
with a smile. “We were ready to live at a slower pace, Arcada
had no bead store, and we thought running one might offer the life
we were looking for -- everything seemed to come together there.”
By 1990 they were able to scrape together the wherewithal to proceed
-- and Heart Bead, a shop that carries a wide array of beads, glass
stone, bone, horn, shell, wood, metal, even antiques and European
trade beads, opened for business.
Two years later the shop began offering classes in “wire work,
the basics, such as wrapping crystals and making chain necklaces,”
Galardy says. Heart Bead now operates with a staff of six, and offers
four to six classes every month. “The store is doing well,”
he says proudly. “We have a lot of tourists to this area, coming
to see the natural wonders, the big redwoods, the streams, the rugged
coastline, and the visitors account for much of our business.”
Galardy started buying art glass beads for the store, and the more
he saw the more intrigued he became with the lampwork process. Then,
three years ago at the Best Bead Show in Tucson, he saw “starter
kits that contained a Hot-head torch, a few basic tools and a sampling
of Moretti glass, opalino, filigrana.” (Galardy no longer uses
the Hot-head, but he has stuck with Moretti, preferring it to all
other glass types.)
“It sounded like fun, the kit cost only $150, and it came
with instructions,” he says. “I tried to figure out for
myself how to get glass strung on the mandrel.” At first he
was impatient, he confesses, not realizing “that glass melts
slowly, and bead making takes lots of time.” Galardy and Wertz
both learned lampworking at the same time, each providing encouragement
to continue when then other became frustrated with the learning
process.
“I was hooked from the start, even though my first three or
four beads were unidentifiable globs, and looked like chewing gum,”
Galardy says, grinning. Two weeks later he bought a Minor Burner,
which burns hotter, and results were more immediate. “I knew
this could be more than a neat hobby, and that if I could make the
product I could market it,” he says. “We had an instant
test market in the store.”
Galardy recently opened a studio at Heart Bead, so passersby can
watch bead making in progress, but most of his work is done at their
home studio, 40 miles away, 12 miles outside the tiny town of Kneeland.
“If you blink you miss it,” Galardy jokes. “There
are only about 30 houses, and our post office is a redwood shack.”
The house has no electricity, “only what solar panels provide
to run batteries. This makes working with kilns tricky,” he
adds.
The house stands at an elevation of 3,000 feet, meaning that winters
last long. (On one occasion last April, Galardy and Wertz became
snowbound after a sudden storm dumped four feet of snow on them.)
“We cut wood for heat, which is a lot of work,” he says.
“I used to wish hard work on myself and now I've got it, but
the truth is, I'd rather be up here and out of wood in the dead
of winter than back in the rat race doing what I used to do in San
Francisco.”
Galardy and Wertz share their home with an eight-year-old dog named,
appropriately enough, Woof, who travels with them to shows, and
four cats named Burbess, Momza, Blackie, and Little. Galardy confesses
that the location of their “rustic home in the mountains”
could hardly be better. “Three ridges in from the ocean,”
wide windows in the house and the studio take in views of the rolling
hills and rainforest of the Pacific Coast range, and the acreage
is statued with tall redwoods, firs, and oaks.
The studio, with windows all along the sunny south wall, is equipped
with a large table and two torches, with a kiln in the center on
a lazy susan. Glass rods in vases, held upright by pebbles in the
bottoms, decorate the room like bouquets of bright spring flowers.
Many
beads end up as part of finished jewelry. In this necklace,
seven lizard egg beads are combined with nubbly silver beads,
short lengths of silver chain, and an assortment of jade beads
as accents. Photo: Guy Louis Selbert. |
LOOKING FOR CHALLENGES. After
the pair began lampworking beads, Galardy “realized I couldn't
get all the information I needed from books,” and so purchased
the Lewis Wilson bead making video series “for some of the
basics. After several months, my glass objects were coming out of
the kiln shiny, ready to go,” he says. “I loved that,
the fact that they didn't need a lot of finish work, like the carvings
in wood and stone I'd tried to make years earlier. I loved it that
glass just melts in the kiln -- it's perfect with no elbow grease
needed.”
Although pleased with the results, he still wasn't satisfied. So
“I tried to challenge myself to make my beads look old, like
stone or wood or bone,” he says. “I began experimenting
with matting solution.” This involved “applying a lumpy
cream to pit the surface of the glass after the bead was made.”
The consistency of the solution was “such that you could dunk
the bead into it, but it was hard to get it off, and also it was
toxic.”
Now, to achieve the matte effect, Galardy uses Etch-all, a “thin
liquid similar to Elmer's glue,” into which he dips beads and
which rinses off with water. This creates the look of ivory, and
gets rid of glossiness. If he wants to etch only parts of a bead,
for instance the background but not the tiny droplets on the dewdrop
beads, Galardy masks the areas to remain shiny. He allows 15 minutes
for drying, then proceeds with the etching process, “just over
a minute in the etching solution,” then peels off the masking
solution.
Many of his beads, including the dewdrops, lizard eggs, and fumed
swirls (similar to the dewdrops, but with curled sea-wave shapes
and a dot of glittery unmatted glass inside each), are created through
a process of laying down a base of ivory-colored glass, then fuming
it with fine silver.
Supporting the ivory glass core on a 3/32" stainless steel mandrel
(which he buys by the foot at a nearby welding shop, then cuts to
the desired lengths), Galardy marvers the core into a cylinder.
Once the core is complete, he holds the bead in front of the flame
to vaporize the silver which the bead then collects, darkening the
ivory color. After fuming, he again heats the bead, which causes
the fuming to “pull apart into a spiderweb pattern, like elephant
ivory.
“Once the fuming is on the bead, I turn down the torch, an
oxygen-propane triple-mix Lynx torch with two oxygen controls, to
a small hot flame,” he explains. Then heating the bead to nearly
liquid, he applies the tip of a clear stringer, gathering the fumed
pattern, “swinging it into a spiral, and texturing the surface
of the bead.”
Dewdrop beads, which measure about two inches in length, are made
in a similar way -- laying down the ivory core, fuming it with silver,
then placing dots with a clear stringer, eight dots to a 3/4" or
less diameter bead, 12 dots for larger beads. For the lizard egg
beads, Galardy adds dots of transparent turquoise-colored glass
to the ivory core, then melting them flush with the surface of the
bead before proceeding with the matte finish. Because leaving a
fumed bead in the matting solution too long removes the fuming,
Galardy rinses off the solution after only a minute, with the consequence
that “some of the lizard-egg beads' dots may still have a shine.”
Galardy's fritter beads also start with a cylindrical ivory core.
Then he adds layers of silver foil by placing the foil on the graphite
marver, then running the hot bead over it. He adds a layer of reduction
frit in a similar way, by sprinkling the frit on the marver -- a
technique which he confesses “took several weeks to work out.”
He melts the layer of frit flush with the bead, then turns the oxygen
off to an orange-blowing flame and returns the bead to the torch.
Frit melting into the ivory glass “brings the silver leaf to
the surface for the honeycomb shape,” he explains. He then
adds the dots, again turning off the oxygen, and “melts them
in the orange flame -- it doesn't take much,” he said.
Finally, Galardy encases the bead's midsection in clear glass and
“swirls the end with a piece of clear stringer.” To prevent
breakage, Galardy anneals his beads, generally between 45 and 50
minutes, with the kiln temperature set between 950 and 980 degrees,
before the slow cooling process begins. Fritter beads, at three
inches longer than many of his other beads, generally serve as the
focal point of a necklace.
The fish-scale beads are made by a very different process than
the matte-ivory style beads. These peices are translucent and brighter,
combining several purples and blues, or green with earth tones of
amber and brown, up to six shades on each bead. Galardy spends up
to two hours on each scale bead, placing multiple series of dots
in overlapping rows, melting each row in turn to achieve the shimmery
fishlike effect.
Galardy uses sterling silver nearly exclusively when creating his
finished jewelry. Findings are from Bali, India, Indonesia, and
occasionally Thailand. Chains are “bench-made sterling, lengths
individually soldered, or wire, generally Soft-Flex which is as
strong as Aculon or tiger tail, but has more flex and doesn't kink,
and also lays nicely.”
He also often incorporates a variety of gemstone beads for accent,
preferring amber, citrine, smoky quartz, and amethyst. While most
of his other beads work best in combinations for necklaces, the
fritters, strung vertically as pendants, generally stand alone or
with only a few accent and silver beads.
Since he and Wertz began making beads three years ago, they have
traveled to several shows to make their work available, taking part
in at the Best Bead Shows in Tucson and Honolulu, and the Embellishment
show.
Galardy says with some vehemence that he has never regretted his
career change, and that lampwork “had me hooked after only
15 minutes. This is a very fun way to make a living,” he said
with a smile. “There's a lot to be said for enjoying what you
do for a living.”
Greg Galardy may be contacted by calling (707)
826-9577, or through HeartBead's Web site at www.heartbead.com.
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