In 1966 Gallo received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of Fine Arts; the fellowship request letter he penned above is both intimate and self-critical, encompassing:  1) his tenure as an art instructor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) from 1960 - 1964, 2) the birth of his daughter, Pauline Marjorie Gallo, in March 1964, and 3) his resignation from the teaching position at UIUC in 1964 "when my work began to take off commercially."  

In the letter, Gallo makes a direct connection between his artistic efforts, artistic medium, and values of expression:

"A John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship would allow me the freedom to concentrate my efforts upon a larger conception--a group of life-sized figures that would embody everything I have learned about my medium and the values that can be expressed in it."  

During his college years and beyond, Gallo maintained an enduring passion for the representation of the "wonderfulness of people" in his art.  His work captured the extraordinary beauty of ordinary actions:  the caress of a neck, the tilt of a chin, the arch of the back.  He believed that personal beauty was uninhibited and intimate, perhaps best expressed by these comments from 1987:  

"For me, simple postures of the human figure are potentially expressive.  There is much concerning the figure that is heretofore unexamined, unfelt, and unimagined."   

In addition to Professor Mauricio Lasansky, who did Gallo turn to for inspiration, just before his work began to receive national and international attention?  

In the early 1960s, Gallo began to use the material polyester resin reinforced with fiberglass to give his sculpture a viscous finish.  This experimentation ultimately culminated in his use of epoxy resin to achieve his desired union of sculptured object and sculptured material:  the smooth and lush surface of his sculptures paralleled the sensual quality of flesh.  

Per Gallo, the epoxy resin synthesized rather than imitated the quality of human skin, providing the desired "light" or luminescence (à la Medardo Rosso).  His nude female sculptures of this period feature reflective and absorptive surfaces and hauntingly beautiful poses, many of which are intentionally elemental in form.  In their presentation, subject and medium complement each other.  

Gallo's own words--in this case from the late 1970s--about the source material for his sculptures detail his all-consuming goal for the visual properties of the medium to be used.  While not expressed verbatim during the early 1960s, they certainly ring true in hindsight:

"I have sought material that has a high light value, a bright luminescent quality -- visual properties that fit comfortably with my subject matter and style and that represent the sense of life that I want to express [the "wonderfulness of people"], simultaneously reflecting and absorbing light, allowing the viewer access into the surface of a work and giving the figures I portray a protoplasmic quality." 

In the March 1972 issue of American Artist magazine, Donald Holden conducted an in-depth interview with Gallo: "Frank Gallo Makes his Own Rules."  The interview ranged from his days as a young student to his artistic aesthetics.  Specifically, on pages 57 - 60 of the article, Gallo gave an excellent overview of his epoxy resin sculpture approach and techniques; the full interview is presented for download in the accompanying graphic box.