Page 26 - the NOISE April 2014

THE BARD OF BALLOONS
helium and hijinks on the hill
STORY BY
SARAH GIANELLI
All I knew about Gary Felix was that he lived in a very cool, octagonal house on a precipice that afforded one of (if not the) best Jerome views; he was a serious cyclist (I’d seen
him more than once pedaling up the mountain in colorful spandex); he played Pétonque (think French Bocce ball) in the cemetery with a group of locals with whom he also enjoyed wood-fired pizza nights; and most intriguingly — because it was so vague — that he made balloons and something about The Olympics.
A screeching parakeet flits from Mr. Felix’s shoulder to mine as he shows me around his home — a timber and steel-beam supported yurt of sorts he built after returning to live perma- nently in Jerome in 1985. Mr. Felix, an avid hang-glider, first moved here in the ‘70s solely for the exhilarating, then-unde- veloped launch off Mingus Mountain. Over a stairwell lined with cast bronze torsos (his artistic roots are in sculpture), is a stained glass skylight that descends like a wooden periscope. An inverted bronze ballerina, inspired by the Olympic under- water dancers, adorns the center — a model he designed for a shopping center in California.
“After Vietnam, I got into hang gliding,” he says. “I decided hang gliders were the most beautiful thing on earth, so I started making hang gliders and skins for my friends, then it turned into moving sculptures.”
Mr. Felix left Jerome to sell his art in California, and was showing his large, mechanical, air driven sculpture and cloth- covered mechanisms in a gallery in Laguna Beach, when he was approached by the organizers of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The theme was “Stars in Motion” and they wanted to add colorful, dynamic pizazz to events held in
“still air” — where no flags would fly. Mr. Felix suggested bal- loons, and frantically set about learning how to make them.
Mr. Felix’s shiny helium stars added pomp to indoor and outdoor events such as the rowing regatta on Lake Casitas; and the wind colonnade he designed — columns topped with twirling rainbow parasols — lined long promenades throughout the games.
Since Mr. Felix’s work for the Olympics put him permanently on the map, his increasingly complex balloon designs have been bought by Anagram, the world’s largest manufacturer of foil balloons; he’s worked in Hollywood (most notably creat- ing lightweight, oversized props for Honey I Shrunk the Kids); decorated the stadium inauguration of WWF celebrity turned Minnesota Governor-elect Jesse “The Body” Ventura; and saved the Macy’s Day Parade hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But his expertise has also been put to uses that far surpass the playful and celebratory, garnering him highly classified engineering projects with the likes of Boeing, BMW, Raythe- on, and the Peacetime Atom Project in New Mexico.
“Working with helium, things float; weight can be taken off boats and cars so they move faster, and it can help people stay safe in the air, all of which has proven very valuable to big industry, including the military,” says Mr. Felix.
Helium is also increasingly expensive, and Mr. Felix knows
what materials, and how to layer, fold, and seal them to best prevent leakage.
“Helium is a very unusual element,” says Mr. Felix. “It comes from irradiated hydrogen. It’s not explosive anymore; it’s inert, but we can’t make it — unless we want to mess with radiation and the bomb, and want to try to find it and capture it after it blows up.”
Mr. Felix is currently at work on a top secret engineering project for Boeing, the complete details of which even he isn’t entirely privy to, but one project he is encouraged to talk about is Stanford University’s Peacetime Atom Project in New Mexico.
“When the government decided to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they felt so guilty about using atomic energy for damage that they wanted to do something for the perma- nent good,” he says. “So they created a super collider that runs a six inch aluminum tube filled with helium around a 12 mile circle, and use radiation to accelerate the particles and bombard animal, vegetable and mineral to study its effects.” At the time, the scientists were pumping $400,000 worth of helium through the tube a day, because it was escaping. They brought in Mr. Felix to fix the issue. “So I made them, and con- tinue to make them, these big clear containers — balloons, essentially — to seal the testing chambers, and save them $400,000 a day.”
Although Mr. Felix’s propensity for all things that fly, float, flap and fold seems to be in the very fabric of his being, he is predominantly self-taught, and by no means goes it alone. For 20 years, he has relied on the beautiful mind of Hugh Sorells (whom he calls one of Jerome’s hidden geniuses) to crunch the numbers into perfection after Mr. Felix has come up with the general concept and design.
“The head engineer for BMW calls all the time,”says Mr. Felix. “In the beginning, he was skeptical of my partner’s credentials. Now, all day long it’s, ‘Can I talk to Hugh? Can I talk to Hugh?’”
When projects dictate, Mr. Felix employs a number of other skilled Jeromans to assemble prototypes, sometimes renting an aircraft hangar in Prescott for large scale projects like the zeppelins that soar in sports stadiums all over Spain, carrying satellite technology that beams the game directly to televi- sion stations. For another European marketing job, he devel- oped a helium shaped balloon to fit inside an ultra-light Sty- rofoam replica of the Ford C-Max hybrid, easily mistakable for the real thing, except it could lift off the ground.
A critical aspect of balloon-making requires a working knowledge of origami — the Japanese art of folding paper into decorative shapes and figures. When MIT recognized its potential uses in the high-tech industry, they instituted a graduate program based on the principles of the ancient art, and called in Mr. Felix to lead workshops for the students.
“I see things in terms of origami,” he says. “I understand how to make a pattern out of folded material — if I fold this bird wing this way, and this bird wing that way, and make it from the side, my bird wings will pop open. It’s the same concept that makes beach balls and air bags. I just do it by hand and
can make it within a small fraction of being correct on the first shot. That’s why origami is a science — you have to get it exactly right.”
Origami constructs are now forming the basis for three- dimensional engineering software, and being applied to cut- ting-edge DNA research, advancements in nanotechnology, and solar design.
Although Mr. Felix’s work has taken on much more serious implications than he ever expected, he still harkens back to the simple, innocent roots that led to what he finds himself doing today.
“Balloons are made to create excitement,” he says. “My favor- ite part of the process is making the first balloon—you take a flat piece of paper and it becomes a big thing. And it shines and it’s sparkly. Flags are similar. They’re celebratory. Some of the nicest things I ever saw while travelling was seeing laun- dry on a line in a foreign country ... flags, cloth in the air, the excitement it generates. For me, it’s all the same. I live off the wind, I play in the wind, and I live here purposefully, in one of the windiest places I could find.”
Mr. Felix still makes art for art’s sake, and enjoys working in metal for its relative permanence and solidity. Two of his enormous iron dragonflies, replete with flapping wings, are currently on display outside the Prescott Valley Library. But, a true inventor, he gets a charge from the financial and creative freedom inherent in industrial engineering projects.
“This guy at Boeing, will call me with a project and I’ll say, ‘that’s almost impossible,’ and he’ll say, ‘cool, how much?’ Engi-
neers know when you’re out on some creative edge, and they want you there. They know what research and development means. They know you might not succeed, and they’re totally willing to pay you to fail.”
I can’t seem to get over the visual dichotomy between these big, intimidating corporate and government entities, and the down-to-earth eccentrics doing important, behind the scenes work for them in their basements, sheds and stu- dios here in little old Jerome.
“The head of DARPA (Defense Advance Research Projects Agency) personally believes that the most inventive people in the world are in their garage, not working for a university or engineering company,” says Mr. Felix in response to my amazement. “And if you look back through history, there’s proof of it. Us little guys in our garages are totally blazing the trail — because we’ve got nothing to lose.”
Mr. Felix has two dynamic sculptures in front of the Prescott Valley Public Library, 7401 E. Civic Circle; and sells balloon- making kits to professional designers, schools, decorators and amateur balloonists around the world. Check them out and learn more about Mr. Felix at balloonkits.com.
| Sarah Gianelli is skilled in the art of brunching it up. sarahgianelli@hotmail.com
26 • APRIL 2014 • the NOISE arts & news • thenoise.us