MEET OUR FARMERS

HEIDI GALLO

Whether she's painting watercolors of oysters in her studio or harvesting them from the waters of Pleasant Bay, Heidi Gallo lives a life that is quintessentially Cape Cod. But it didn't start out that way.

Born and brought up in the Worcester area, she worked in a bank there for 14 years. Her heart, however, lay with art, and she also put herself through the Worcester Art Museum School. There she won a scholarship for a photography seminar in Ireland, which turned out to have a lifelong impact.

Heidi had had no contact with Cape Cod other than day trips to the beach as a teenager. It was actually skiing that brought her here. Working weekends on the ski patrol at Mount Wachusett, she met a fellow patrol member, Art Gallo. He was commuting from the Cape, where he worked for the telephone company. They married in 1991and it's been all downhill since!

How did she get into shellfish farming? That was a result of working at a health club. Overhearing a conversation about raising clams on an Orleans farm piqued her interest. Heidi had dug for steamers on Maine vacations and found it fun. When she offered to lend a hand, the couple was surprised, since it was January, not the golden days of summer. But the next day found her on their boat braving a 30-degree-below-zero wind chill.

"There was ice on the water and I had to trudge through a marsh lugging nets--luckily I was in good shape because I'd been working out," she remembers. "It was hard, but great!" Not surprisingly, they hired her that summer.
In 1994, she and Al, who was new to shellfishing, applied for a grant. She Sells Sea Farms had its best year in 1999 when profits allowed them to buy a car and a boat. Heidi says: "It wasn't so much because of our careful planning, either."

They had a sub-tidal grant (which means that a few inches of water were always over her shellfish). "It was another clammer who noticed something unusual going on," she admits. "It turns out that steamers were had started growing under our littlenecks. The holes the littlenecks made under the netting were filled with steamer spat." That happy "accident" produced 10,000 pounds of steamers!

For a decade, the grant was her major job. Art, who took early retirement, did and still does, most of the planning and equipment work. These days, though, while the farm still produces about 50,000 oysters a year, Heidi is devoting more time to her thriving art career. Having always worked in oils or with a camera, she is now a watercolor artist. This change in direction, too, came about rather by chance.

Walking in to the Homeport Restaurant one day, Heidi saw Kelley Knowles' watercolors. She decided to take a watercolor class that Kelley was teaching at Nauset Adult Education. "She's my inspiration," says Heidi. "I had never done any watercolor, and honestly, I thought it would be pretty easy. It's not. It took nine years before I felt proficient!"

A friend suggested selling one of her paintings, and that led Heidi to take a marketing course with the Lower Cape Cod Community Development Corporation. "I learned a lot about the business side of art," she explains, "including the need to frame my work more effectively."Her contact with Artworks, a framing shop and gallery in Orleans, led to a part-time framing job. Today, her work is displayed there, as well as in gallleries like Oceana and Yankee Ingenuity. She specializes in landscapes, old Cape buildings, and shells.

It all has come full circle for Heidi now. She takes her camera out in the summer to shoot what she paints in her studio during the quiet of winter. "I try to be very realistic," Heidi explains. "I love it when someone says 'it looks like a photograph.' "

Despite her artistic success, Heidi doesn't plan to stop shellfish farming. "I want to do it until I'm 100 years old," she says. "I love that as much as I love my art. Working in the bank for all those years, I never had any windows. Now I really appreciate working outside--and working alongside Al."

For more about Heidi's art, go to: www.localcapecolors.com