ARIODANTE GALLERY

535 Julia Street
New Orleans, LA 70130
ph: 504-524-3233

Melissa and Gerry Art in Jewelry

We are a New Orleans husband and wife whose decades of design and artistic work has led us to creating art in jewelry. Always passionate about jewelry, Melissa has designed and made jewelry for herself for many years. Gerry produced architectural etched glass in New Orleans for thirty years before deciding to focus on his art glass. But our collaboration to make jewelry art was born of a stroke of serendipity. Melissa asked Gerry to produce a miniature of one of his sculptures so she could hang it as a pendant from a necklace of hers that she felt needed some enhancement. The first night she wore it was to dinner with a friend who had visitors from Paris, a viscount and his wife, a fashionable professional woman. To our delight, she asked us to recreate the piece for her. A piece which, we understand, is still being worn by her in Paris.

When Gerry had his first one-person art gallery show, we were asked to include some “Melissa and Gerry” jewelry pieces displayed as art in shadow boxes. They sold! One of the gallery owners told Melissa that women were fighting over the jewelry at the back of the gallery. An artist’s dream! Thus encouraged, we decided to take the plunge by placing jewelry pieces in other galleries representing Gerry's art glass.

MELISSA'S STORY

At an early age, in the 1950s, I remember anticipating the monthly arrival of the National Geographic publication. My parents sought its observation of worlds unknown, and my brothers, the photos of bare-breasted native women. But I found myself fascinated with the fabulous, vividly colored necklaces that the native women wore in dizzying numbers around their necks, and the stacks of jingling bracelets on their long, graceful arms. This was the birth of my long-held belief in the importance of accessories over clothes!

I began designing and making jewelry for myself many years ago. First, to create what I thought was the perfect accessory for a particular outfit, and then, to redesign and remake pieces I had grown fickle about. And since Gerry had been making etched and carved glass art for many years, as well, it was a small leap to combine our shared love of texture, rhythm and color to create unique jewelry pieces.

GERRY'S STORY

My art background is the school of hard knocks. After some very basic instruction in etching glass, I expanded my techniques and my artistic ability "on the job" in my own architectural etched glass business. I started with no ability that I knew of and no training. And no clients! But I loved the medium of etched and carved glass for use in windows, walls, doors, furniture, shower enclosures and signs. So I studied photographs of etched glass and did many experiments to figure out how to get the complex effects of shading, overlaying and stage-carving that I saw.

As I did more and more complex commissions for clients (yes, eventually I did have many clients!), I began to get excited by the new forms and textures I was learning to do in glass. I was inspired by bird wings, flowing water, waves, leaf vein patterns, rocks, mountains, architecture, and even oil patches on water. And the rhythmic textures and counterpoint in the music of such as Beethoven or Schubert, Phillip Glass or Led Zeppelin added to the impulses that drive my textural vocabulary. I started to explore ways to translate everything into the forms and textures I could produce by etching glass.

I have now shifted my focus to the miniature work in our jewelry, using the techniques born of this earlier work in large architectural glass. And these small pieces weigh a whole lot less than those huge windows!

THE JEWELRY

Our work features miniature carved glass sculptures with a wide diversity of pearls, and precious, semi-precious and sometimes very ordinary stones and beads in delightful, often surprising styles.

From the beginning, our collaboration was fruitful. Gerry made technical improvements necessary for working at this small scale and his miniature sculptures took on new features, shapes and textures. Melissa's jewelry designs are derived from her well-defined sense of style and form and her exciting use of texture and color. And when she combines one of Gerry's miniature sculptures with whatever satisfies her creative eye, the result is an arresting art piece that is unique, elegant and fun to wear. Those who have worn them (and many of our friends have test-driven them!) tell us that they really do get noticed.

 

 

 

ARIODANTE GALLERY. All rights reserved.

535 Julia Street
New Orleans, LA 70130
ph: 504-524-3233