In Her Words: Fay Balk Finds Her Creative Spark In Glass, Travel & Nature
While working as an HR executive and organizational design expert for the nation's largest creative company, she found her own artistic talent, which led her down a new path of self-discovery.
I love pomegranates. I think they are really pretty, and they make me think of Italy. I saw them everywhere when I visited Murano on a group trip to study glassmaking. On a side visit to a vineyard in Prosecco, I noticed a dwarf pomegranate plant at the entrance to one of the outbuildings.
Now I’m working on a glass sculpture of a dwarf pomegranate plant for the 2025 Glass Lifeform Exhibition, to be held in Pittsburgh in February by the Glass Lifeform organization. Entries must be depictions of plants, bugs, or animals that exist in the world. You have to submit a scientific illustration or photograph, and you have to provide the Latin scientific name of your subject. You can have creative interpretation in the way you display it, but the representation of the actual plant has to be true to life, and every model must be composed primarily of glass (60% or more). I’m doing my dwarf pomegranate as a bonsai. That’s my creative interpretation. Many of my pieces are inspired by my travels and by things I’ve seen in nature.
I’m a huge traveler. I set a goal to visit 50 countries before I turned 50 and I hit my goal at age 48. I got married right before I turned 43 and I’ve brought my husband along on a lot of these adventures. For a while I worked in an international HR generalist role with Hallmark, which fit me perfectly. I traveled around the world a couple times a year and was able to see how the organization came to life in different cultures, which was fascinating. I visited Australia, Japan, the Netherlands and the UK. Before visiting other English speaking cultures, I thought “Oh, they speak English. It shouldn’t be that different.” But they are very different. That was fascinating.
In the early ‘90s, also while at Hallmark, I convinced the head of the company’s career development program that I needed to understand what it was like to work as a creative person. What does it feel like when you come in to work and you're not feeling creative? I was able to spend three months in what was known as Hallmark’s Creative Workshop, which is where Hallmark artists could go to rejuvenate and to learn new skills. It was a gift. I literally got to play.
While I was in the Hallmark Creative Workshop, I was primarily doing ceramics. I also got into mosaics. That was my first exposure to glass and I really enjoyed it. That got me interested in glass as a medium, and I started collecting glass. I would go to art shows and fairs and I was always attracted to the glass, so I started buying small pieces. Over the decades, I got exposed to glass blowing. We have a friend of our family who is a very good glass hobbyist. They converted their garage into a hot shop and I spent a weekend with them to learn glass blowing. I realized that it probably was not for me. I’m petite and asthmatic and glass blowing is a very physical team sport. If you have something on the end of one of those punties that’s five pounds, it feels like a lot more than that when you’re trying to turn it and hold it and balance it.
I've always been a creative person. Growing up, I sewed, I baked, I would repaint my room, so I loved the idea of working for a creative company. At the time that I joined Hallmark, it was much different than it is today. The internet hadn’t been invented yet. People were buying and mailing cards much more than they do today, and Hallmark had the world’s largest creative community. When I started in 1992, we had more than 35,000 employees worldwide. The total was probably about 17,000 or so by the time I left in 2020, and now it’s a fraction of that.
At the end of my time at Hallmark, I was running one of our HR centers of excellence and things were changing, especially in human resources. I wasn’t ready to stop working, but I didn’t want to spend another 10 years at Hallmark either. I started working with a career coach and she asked “What drives you? What gets you jazzed up?” I told her I liked creativity. My work at Hallmark was creative in its own way, because I was helping create new and better organizations. But I needed something more tangible. She got me to look at my 1,000 excuses: I don't have time. I'm too busy. I'm overwhelmed with work, and this and that. She said “Fay, just sign up for one art class. That's all you need to do.”
I found a glass studio in Kansas City offering an “Introduction to Bead Making” class, but I couldn’t sign up because it was a 2-day class and I had another commitment on one of those days. Then one of my best friends from grad school was visiting with her husband who also loves glass. While they were in town, we drove an hour outside of Kansas City to a place called Moon Marble where we watched a glass marble making demo. At the end, I went to talk to Sara, the woman who was doing the demo, to ask if she knew of other people that did glass classes near me and it turned out that she was the owner of the glass studio in Kansas City. I told her, “I was going to sign up for your intro class, but I can only be there for the first day.” She said, “Come on and do the first day. You can always come back and do the second day with me individually. I’m teaching the class.”
I took that class with Sara and a month later, I lost my job and received severance. I thought “I'm going to take a year off, and I'm going to figure out what I want to do.” I grew up at Hallmark. I was there for 30 years. I was going through a grieving process. I needed to unwind, and I needed a break from being a “Hallmarker”. I put the career coaching on hold, and I started going to the studio two or three times a week, for five hours at a time, renting studio space, and starting to work on my own. It was practice, practice, practice. Then Covid happened. Covid forced me to stop thinking about next steps in my career. I literally spent six months at Sara’s studio doing glass, and it helped me. It was a meditative and reflective period that allowed me to heal and find that so much of what I did in my work at Hallmark, I could see in glass. It took me a while to realize that I am an artist.
In July 2021, the former head of HR at Hallmark, called me and asked me to do some work for his church, which happens to be the largest Methodist Church in the country. I am Jewish, but they needed organizational help, which is my specialty. During Covid, they had this huge uptake of online participants. They wanted to create an online community — not just online worship — and they were not organized to do that. Although they were in Kansas City, I ended up working part-time from home for them for a year. I helped them completely change their organization. That project started me in my consulting practice sooner than I thought. Since that time, I have been growing my glass business, working as a glass artist, and working part-time as an organizational consultant. The consulting work ebbs and flows, which allows me to get two or three months at a time to really pour myself into glass.
As I’m getting more and more into it, I’m preferring the sculptural work, but I still like doing jewelry. Making beads is good when I haven’t been on my torch for a while. It’s grounding. If I’m too busy to really focus on the sculptural, which takes a lot more concentration because it’s just not as natural for me, I start with beads. Then I can move into other stuff. Doing beads is my Zen. The sculptural work is the real creative stuff.
Over the past two and a half years, I started applying to some juried shows. I’ve gotten accepted at some and not at others. Coming full circle, Hallmark has an annual art fair for current Hallmark artists and retirees to sell their individual work and I participate in that.
If you could go back in time and give advice to your 25 year old self, what would you tell her?
I would say, “Try to explore your passion sooner. Don’t let life get in the way.” I was educated. I had a master’s degree. I needed a career. I wanted to take care of myself. I wanted to be independent. I mean, these are all great things. I enjoy my career. I still want to help organizations thrive and grow and change, but that didn’t feed me in the same way that glass does. I wish I knew that earlier. I tell that to my nieces and nephews all the time.
Belle Curve Stories is about women navigating life with grit, grace, and growth. What do those three words mean to you?
Grit to me is the stick-to-it-ness, perseverance, curiosity, and willingness to do things you know you’re not going to be perfect at and keep trying and learning. Grit, grace, and growth go hand in hand. Those three are overlapping, concentric circles. You’re not going to grow unless you have some grit and you’re willing to be uncomfortable. Growth is about exploration, curiosity, willingness to try and try again and be vulnerable. Grace to me is sharing in the emotional ride as well — the joy and the excitement of seeing the joy and the fun that people have experiencing my work. That’s how grace comes to life for me. I’m not necessarily the world’s most emotive person in my interactions with people, but seeing them experience joy or wonder when they see my art makes me really happy, and sharing that happiness is a way of me being graceful.
As told to and edited by Teresa Bellock and Sandra Ditore.
Fay Balk, 59, originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has made her home in Kansas City, Missouri, for more than 30 years. She is an artist, traveler, wife, former HR executive for Hallmark Cards, Inc., and a self-employed organizational consultant. In addition to working as a glass artist, Fay advises organizations on organizational health and effectiveness, including strategic alignment; culture; and talent management and development through her consulting practice. You can follow Fay on Instagram.
Good to read your story, Fay. I relate to your talk healing after Hallmark and how a creative outlet is so helpful in doing that. I also empathize with your thoughts to your younger self. While I can't really regret my career path (the friends and experiences it enabled), I do sometimes wonder what my life would have been like had I had the confidence and resolve to be an artist from the beginning.
Excellent story, Fay!