Bruce A. Fry

Bruce A. Fry has a deep love for gemcutting and gemstones, but most of all for tourmaline. He learned how to facet gemstones from the inventor of the Raytech faceting machine when he was a teen and eventually discovered the amazing array of colors and shades that only tourmaline has.

Since then he has focussed on sourcing, cutting and amassing the world's foremost collection of tourmaline gemstones. Along this journey he discovered a new variety of exceedingly rare copper-bearing reverse color-change tourmaline from Mozambique, which he has named Laurellite.

This website is the latest step in sharing the wonderful beauty of tourmaline to widest audience possible.

"Since the first thing you get to see is me holding an oil painting of myself, I guess I should explain how this most extraordinary event came to be. I was alone and trying to recover from a major operation when some neighbors helped with getting my yard together. Well it turned out that one of them was a professional artist that liked to do portraits. It sounded like he could use a hand and I was ready to celebrate life again. We talked about doing an egg tempura painting which would have been something brand new for him, but ended up going for his bread and butter, which is oil painting. He wanted to work with hands and I wanted a friendly sharing picture, so I came up with the pose."