Jewel Struck: Outer Banks woman’s lifelong love affair with gems continues

Jeweler Gail Kowalski, the owner of Jewelry by Gail in Nags Head, has her dream job. And she’s doing it in the one place that she knew from an early age back in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania she wanted to be.

“My very best friend in high school, Sharon Harwick, and I were talking and she remembers it. I told her that I had decided I was going to learn how to make jewelry. And I was going to move to the Nags Head and open my own business,” Kowalski recalls.

Ninth grade was the year her school began a jewelry program and by her own admission, she wasn’t particularly drawn to it, it was just “something new,” she says.

But magic struck.

“I fell utterly and absolutely in love with making jewelry,” she says.

It is a love affair that has never diminished.

She reaches behind her and pulls out a gold bracelet with a sun radiating from it.

“It’s a copper based bracelet. And then a brass sun. This was my first piece that channeled the beach,” she says.

She made two similar pieces in ninth grade and the following year the, “the school had something going on over the weekend that didn’t involve the kids.”

Arriving at school the next week her art teacher had a surprise. “He said, ‘Somebody saw your bracelet Saturday and they want to buy it.’”

They settled on a $40 price, and called the woman. “… and the lady said okay and she bought my very first piece ever. So it was 40 bucks.”

She went to Siena Heights College in Michigan — now a university — on an art scholarship. Mid winter in her senior year she and her mother came to the Outer Banks to see if there was any opportunity for a jeweler.They found a likely spot for Gail to begin her career.

“R&R Junction, it was like an artists’ collective,” she says. The building is now Booty Treats on the Beach Road.

But she was told she was too late. They had just contracted with someone to make jewelry. “I was devastated,” she says.

Back at school, though, she got a phone call.

“Whoever they had coming to make jewelry didn’t work out, and was I still interested? ‘Oh absolutely,’” she recalls saying.

After five years of working at a bench surrounded by other artisans at R&R, she was ready to move on and she had spotted a house at the corner of Driftwood and South Memorial Avenue in Nags Head. It’s where Jewelry by Gail is still located. But the building looked nothing like it does today.

“The house was in very bad disrepair,” she said.

It was not a good time to buy property. Her parents co-signed the 17.5% loan on the house, and her father promptly had what appeared to be a heart attack.

“We had to chopper him out. It turned out it was sheer absolute anxiety and gastroenteritis,” Gail said, adding she didn’t really understand what 17.5% interest meant at the time.

“I do now.”

She first came to the Outer Banks in 1963 with her family and there has always been something special about the way the elements of nature seem to converge at the shore.

“This is a totally idyllic place. A beautiful, wonderful, very different landscape than most anyplace else.”

It is the Outer Banks that has inspired her jewelry.

“For me what I do, being here, I really love interpreting the movement, the way the water moves. And the way the air and the wind moves and the way the plants and the sea oats move,” she says. “It’s like my work is kind of frozen motion.”

Gail’s jewelry is as distinctive as the environment that inspires her. She describes what she creates as “symmetrical asymmetrical balance.” Probably not something that can be found in art lexicons, but is as good a description of her jewelry as there is.

Every piece she designs is unlike anything else she has made. Even a pair of earrings has differences, some subtle, some apparent.

She works with precious and semi-precious stones, amethysts, diamonds, emeralds, opals, rubies — within those stones, Gail feels there is something special to be found.

“There are a lot of subtle colors that you don’t even see at first and especially as you begin to work with it, those colors start to really come out,” she says.

What seems to fascinate her, as much as the colors of the stones, is why those colors even exist.

“I realized a few years ago, really like a revelation. There is no reason that any rock should be stunning,” she said. “There is no reason any rock should be any exquisite color at all. It’s not for their survival…And I thought ‘why in the world would God have made the beautiful stones’ and I realized, that was His gift to us.“

It is that very distinctive way of thinking about the jewelry she creates that has allowed her to grow Jewelry by Gail from the ramshackle building to the expansive showroom that is now home to her jewelry.

Her jewelry is not a look or a style that will appeal to everyone, something she readily admits. She has, though, loyal customers who find her work compelling.

“We have quite a few customers that don’t bother looking at run of the mill, or average jewelry store offerings. They like what I do. Thank God, because they have allowed me to do this now going on the forty-sixth year,” she says. “I think on that and I don’t know how it happened.”

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