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FEATURE STORY
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On A Roll After years spent in the rat race, Greg Galardy tapped into his creative side and started making lampworked beads. by Pamela Selbert | ||
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| A variation on the scale bead (left) is the “star scale” (right) for which each scale is decorated with a spray of tiny, daisylike petals. Cream-colored beads, faintly mottled with mocha, dotted with green or brown, are called “lizard eggs” (center). Photo: Guy Louis Selbert. | ||
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Although Greg Galardy has been intrigued with glass as long as he can remember, and “always wanted to melt it,” he didn't originally plan to become a bead maker. But in the past three years he's made up for lost time. Today, Galardy creates an array of styles, many of which resemble old ivory decorated with tiny “dewdrops,” swirls, or smooth and precisely arranged speckles. The “dewdrop” beads seem, in fact, to be sprinkled with tiny drops of clear water. The speckled beads, cream-colored and faintly mottled with palest mocha, dotted with pale green or brown, are called “lizard eggs” for obvious reasons, while the fumed swirls are reminiscent of eye beads. Most elegant of all are Galardy's “fritter” beads, thumb-length ivory cylinders with midsections thickened by layers of pale tan and amber glass applied in a honeycomb design highlighted by tiny dots of turquoise glass. Other beads in Galardy's collection are patterned, with overlapping circles of various colors resembling fish scales. Beads festooned with scales, each decorated with a spray of tiny, daisylike petals, he calls “star scales”. Clearly, Galardy puts much effort into the meticulous details of each of his creations, many of which end up as part of unusual necklaces. In one of these, seven lizard egg beads in as many shapes are combined with nubbly silver beads, rounds, cones, ovals, and disks, short lengths of silver chain, and an assortment of jade beads in disks, rounds, and a dozen baroque shapes as accents. The unusual piece is clearly the work of a highly creative individual. Yet Galardy confesses that his creative side emerged only within the last decade. |
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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.
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.”
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