Article archive / March 1, 2010
Originally published: . Volume 1, No. 7. Source pages: 10, 11.
“I have an artistic side,” Dr. Karen Speier said. “It is a part of me that I have to have some outlet for.” The presence of this artistic side is all around, as we sit in her lovely Baton Rouge home, designed and renovated by Karen and her husband. Her great room dramatically opens to light and scenery, with ceiling to floor glass doors and windows. She has crafted her cabinets and pantries from recovered antique cypress blanks, original to the structure, creating warmth and depth. She has a century and a half old butcher’s block reborn as a vanity, imported from France, which resonates with her family’s history. Custom stonework, masonry art, antiques, and original paintings accent her home in colors, textures and meaning, and her artistic style.
In her jewelry designs, Karen expresses this same artistic side when working with metals, beads and other materials to create the images and the inspirations she is searching for.
How did she get started? “I bought some beads at a store in the neighborhood and I didn’t have any knowledge of what I was doing,” she said. “So, that was not real satisfying,” Then she took classes at the Baton Rouge Bead Company, where she learned advanced techniques for attaching beads, making special connecting loops and stringing techniques for various mediums of metals and materials.
Karen is particularly interested in custom made beads, using them in many of her jewelry designs. “Each bead is made by hand,” she explained. Called “Lampwork” beads, the bead worker uses rods of glass and different colors, placing the glass over a flame that is between 1800 and 2200 degrees, to build up layers of glass. “It’s amazing the different qualities you can get,” she said. “Each bead is like a mini-work of art.”
Karen doesn’t tackle this, saying, “I have a tendency to burn myself when just making cookies.”
For Karen, the most enjoyable part is the design.
“Usually I start with a set of the Lampwork beads, trying them in different ways. I’ll get halfway through it and decide it’s not right and start all over again. It’s not something I do very quickly.”
Her business, which she calls “Inspirations” allows her to purchase materials wholesale and helps her share her designs. “One of my ideas was that my jewelry would be inspiring to people,” she said. “I decided I could have themes, and one I picked was ‘resilience.’ That’s a popular concept for psychologists. So, along with each set of beads, I made a card that described the materials in the beads, and a saying that went with resilience.”
Does she plan on more shows in the future? “If I could find a way to do shows where I could actually not lose money, I might do that,” she smiled.
Dr. Speier is a licensed psychologist, a neuropsychologist as well as a medical and clinical psychologist. Her interest and expertise are in PTSD, depression secondary to sexual abuse for children, adolescents and adults, and secondary to traumatic accidents, especially involving head injury.
She works with individuals with anxiety disorders, adjustment problems to separation, divorce, remarriage, or death of a parent for children and adolescents, and emotional and functional issues of adolescents and adults with ADHD.
She also works with adults with medical conditions, including fibromyalgia, and injuries that have resulted in limitations that require lifestyle changes, or that typically cause significant distress and sometimes lead to a "premature crisis of aging."
Dr. Susan Dardard tries on one of Dr. Karen Speier’s designs from her “Inspirations” collection.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.