Common Ground 202 - Gourd Artist Alretta Skellenger

Lakeland Public Television's Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. Hi there. My name is Alretta Skellinger. I'm a gourd artist. I use the term loosely. I would like to introduce you to the art of working with gourds, and I'm going to take you from the beginning step, hopefully to the end. We start off with dirty gourds. The question I'm most often asked is, do I grow my own gourds? The answer is no. I buy my gourds from a gourd farm in California. They have thousands of gourds. They stay out in the field for at least a year to dry. When I get them, they look like this, covered in mold, debris. There's kind of a film on them. So that means I have to clean them before I can even begin to get started. I clean them by soaking them in water and scouring them with this little Brillo pad. Then after I've cleaned the outside, I then have to get to the inside. side. Now my task is to try and get to the inside of the gourd. Before I even start, I need to have a pretty good idea of what I'm going to do with it because on this particular gourd, I've decided I'm not going to keep the top. If I was going to keep the top, I couldn't start opening it this way. I drilled a small hole there. Can you see that little hole? I drilled that hole so that the blade of my mini saw would fit. I can just put this blade into the hole and hang on here we go. I also want to point out that you need to be cautious of this dust. It's toxic and it has a tendency to suspend in the air. It doesn't settle and for that reason I usually wear a mask and I also have an air filtration system that picks up any of those fine particles in the air. Now we have we've cut off the top of the gourd now we get to see what's inside you know that's not so bad but there's a bit of a mess on the inside that means I have to get that out by the way if you're looking for gourd seeds I have a few there's always a couple I give them away to kids and and sell them on the side I made that up I don't really but now I want to show you how I clean the inside of the gourd it's very it's tough it's hard it's not as fragile as you think it would be and they're very lightweight because they're they're dry but they're really quite strong you can see how thick this gourd is and that's the main reason I buy my gourds from California the growing season is longer the gourd becomes thicker in its growth you can grow gourds in Minnesota but because the growing season is shorter, the gourd becomes very thin, therefore it does become fragile whenever you cut into it. I have an abrasive ball that I bought from a website for gourds. I just have it in my drill motor and I use this to clean and it's messy. I draw a design on with pencil, usually sketch it, seldom use a pattern, and then I'll be going to another station in order to do the wood burning because I have all my tools set up over there. This is my wood burning station I call it. I have I've taken a different gourd and one of the things I did want to point out this gourd is not going to sit up by itself. If I tried to sit it by itself it would it would tip. So another thing that I do is I make gourd stands. I paint them and this is just a bare model here but so now that gourd can sit in any position. I drew a quick sketch on here of a moose. I do not not leave it on the stand while I'm working on it, but it keeps me from dropping it on the floor. There are many different kinds of wood burning tools. I like to use what's called a hot tool. It's the kind you use when you're a kid doing things. But I like it even though I can't adjust the temperature on it, I have better control. I'm going to put this on my lap to help hold it. This is my test block. Oh yeah, it burns in there and I get little bit of smoke. The gourd has different densities so sometimes your tool is moving very very smoothly and all of a sudden you make a big hole because it's you never know what you're gonna run into. Try to keep a constant movement and you can see where I've skipped a couple of places I'll have to go back and check that and notice that I'm moving the gourd as well as moving my hand. Okay I have to stop because I've run out of out of movement room but I I have to go back and touch up. In burning, I get debris on the tip of the tool, so I just wipe it off on a little piece of sandpaper. See if I can do part of this moose. I always pull the tool. I never push it, because if I tried to push it, I would just dig in. Well, I just have to persevere and see how my tool slips off. Well, there's a beginning. I chose a moose for this gourd because we're in Minnesota, and I didn't think that a kangaroo would be appropriate anything else so I thought I'd try something that reminded people of Minnesota. A great deal of the design on the gourd is determined by the gourd itself. I have to wait and tell me what the gourd says. I know that sounds silly but I have one gourd that I looked at for six months before I could figure out what to do with it simply because it was a unique gourd. Now sometimes I have a design in mind, at least I have an end result in mind. How I get there isn't always the way I had thought I was going to go. Some gourds look like they should be carved, some gourds look like they should be just something pretty on them. Well and I have to stop for a moment because every now and then my little Yorkie comes down to say hello and if I don't stop and pick her up tell her she's a pretty girl. This is Mara. She says I don't like it down here it's too noisy. Okay now she'll go back upstairs. That's our little routine. I don't know if you can hear or not but there is a little sizzling that occurs when I'm getting into it like I should be. With that gives you an idea on how the wood burning goes. It can be very tedious but it's very rewarding because now I can see what I'm doing. This is an example of a gourd with a surprise in that it looks like the gourd is whole however it is not and this inside needs to be treated. I could leave it the natural color but I would have to put some kind of an adhesive on it, spray of some kind. So what I do instead is I use leather dye. Same kind of stuff you put on shoes. I prefer to put the black leather dye in here on the inside because that then allows the design on the outside, especially if there's carving, it allows the design to be dominant and it's the light color of the inside of the gourd doesn't distract from the design. It's It's very porous on the inside. On the outside, it's very hard. I then remove that outer shell, that outer protective shell. And if I put this leather dye on the inside, it'll soak right through and show up on the outside. Well, I don't want it to do that. Voila. Now, the inside does not affect the outside because I've not removed any of the outer shell. I started this one and got a little irritated with it, so I stopped. But I've been carving on this, and this is another one with a surprise. See, there's the top. And I will carve all of these down, but it's quite a lengthy process, and so I got bored with it. I thought, I'll wait until another time. So I've been working on this one. The name of this one is Teardrops and Lace, because that's what it reminded me of. It's Dremel and Fordham. There's a lot of torque involved, and so what you have to be the most aware of is where this hand is. I try it because this can move, it can pull away. I thought I'd show you how I get my holes in there. I just draw some lines to give me an idea. That gives you an idea how I get the holes in there. It takes a couple of hours to get that completed. The next step will be using ink dyes. These are all the different colors of ink dye that I have and because I had trouble remembering what the colors look like I made a sample. I couldn't remember the name so I gave them numbers. I have 17 colors and I have a fairly limited palette with the ink dyes. I prefer the ink dyes. The leather dye soaks in and over time will fade. So the leather dye is fine on the inside but any UV will fade the leather dye so I prefer the ink dye. Now my current project is this dragon. It has been wood-burned, carved a little bit. It has a surprise. It opens this way. I have treated the inside. Okay, the ink dye is very concentrated. This little bottle can do probably half a dozen gourds this size, but I only use a dot. And I have a very high-tech painting tool. It's called Half the Q-Tip. Why do I use only half and not the whole Q-Tip, you ask? Because if I used a whole Q-tip and then changed color, I would then have that color in my hand. So I use half a Q-tip. This is a brown. The nice thing also about the ink dye is it doesn't dry immediately. That gives me a little bit of working time. How do I get in those nooks and crannies? With a very little brush. If I was using leather dye, this would be dry by now and I wouldn't be able to get the color where I wanted it or be able to wipe it as I'll show you here in a moment. And a little bit of cotton ball. This is just to pull up the color. I have to be careful to not smear it into another section. And when I'm satisfied with that I then take a heat gun. The heat gun actually has two purposes. It not only sets the paint or the ink dye right away so it doesn't go anyplace you don't want it. It also keeps me from putting my finger in the middle of some wet paint. Now I'm going to continue that brown underneath of this black line all the way around. With the gold leaf, before applying it, you paint the area a cherry red, which sounds really strange until you notice some of the old paintings that have gold leaf on them. As that gold cracks, there is a color behind it and that color is red and it makes the gold appear older, appear richer, and so I put the red behind before I even get started. In order to make the gold leaf adhere, I use what is called size. This comes in a little gold leaf kit, it wasn't hard to find. I paint this on, you probably won't be able to see it. That's where the wood burning came in handy, my size would have run down, but the wood burning around the talon stopped it from doing that until I could get to it and of course my heat gun saves the day like contact cement it gets tacky when it's dry I'm going to open up the gold leaf packet and you'll see what I mean about it being very fragile it tears very easily and a trick that I found if I use a piece of wax paper to pick it up put this on top electricity holds the gold leaf. Put the gold leaf on here. This is to give the dragon a little bit of. Doesn't matter if it's wrinkled. Doesn't matter. This is a fairly stiff brush. Any brush will do. And I kind of stipple it down in there and then I brush it off. Any place that I did not get a good contact between the gold leaf and the size, that red shows through. I'm going to leave that. I could, I could cover that. But I I like that red to show through just a little, not much. It's one of those little things that nobody ever notices. I have a little etching tool here, and I use that to clean up the edge. If the edge goes into the groove and I don't want it there. We have one toenail done. One must be careful to not sneeze when doing this. I've always wanted to do a dragon, simply because I never had before. So I thought, well, I'll try this one, let's see. This gourd is the very first gourd I ever did. Very first one. I had no idea how to do them. I had no idea what I was doing. So I just put cracks and things on it. And I put a little bit of rock art. And said, there, I did a gourd. Now this is done with leather dye. The color has faded, because it's been sitting close to the window. So it doesn't have the intensity that the gourds do that I use the ink dye on. But I save it because it tells me how I started. That was my first one. But it was my first attempt at wood burning. It was my first attempt at drawing something on a gourd. Luckily I picked a small gourd so I didn't mess up too badly. I don't know when I became an artist. I still find that term hard to live with. I had taught the class, my class, some basic drawing and I kind of picked up on that. I liked that. And then when I retired, I tried some pointillism. That was fun, and then I found the gourds. I've been doing gourds maybe three, four years. The pointillism I did a couple years before that. So it just kind of was something I wanted to try. I never really decided to become an artist. Nobody else does gourds. I thought, here's something I can try, and if I mess up, nobody knows. Besides which, I just, I found it fascinating. Every gourd is different. It isn't like having a square of canvas. every gourd tells you something else so I find it very fascinating to use the gourds. The thing I enjoy most about the process of working with gourds is the surprise. I never know what's going to happen and it's always a surprise when something happens and it comes out okay. Of course I do make a lot of lemonade because sometimes it doesn't work out but that's okay, that's okay. But I like not knowing where it's going to end up and then when I do get there I'm surprised. I wanted to make them smile. I don't have anything online at this time however I do belong to the Blank Canvas Gallery in Park Rapids and I do have my gourds displayed there. I do sell them there. I also belong to the Leech Lake Art League and we are having our art show in Walker. I display my gourds and sell them there. I would do commissioned pieces. I'd be a little nervous but I I would give it a try. People understand that the gourd doesn't always do exactly what you want it to. It makes up its own mind for you sometimes. Like when I was trying to do the wood burning, I was having difficulty with that particular gourd because the shell was so, so dense. The next gourd it might not be, you never know. I'm trying to determine what my style is. I haven't come up with my style, I don't think. But I do find that I like to have each board be different than what you expect it to be. So I guess that's my style. I guess that's what I find to be the most interesting about my work is that you never know is the top going to come off or not? Is it going to have a hole in it or not? Is it going to be something that you can see through or something that you have to pick up and look at? So I like to have it be a surprise. I think one of the most frustrating things for me is having to look at the gourd when it is dirty and icky and having to have in my mind what the end result, what I would like the end result to be. It's difficult for me to come up with a design or a pattern or a plan without looking at that gourd for a very, very, very long time. It doesn't, it isn't something that just happens. So that becomes then frustrating for me to trying to decide what I'm going to put on the gourd. Well, it's exciting when it starts to come together, like the dragon. I'd always wanted to do a dragon. I had no idea what a dragon would look like or how it would fit on a gourd, but when it did fit, when it just happened to go on the way that it did, that was exciting and that would get me all jazzed and I would try to, I want to go down and work on it all the time even though, you know, I can't because my eyeballs fall out and my hands get all quivery, but it's exciting. I would like people to know that it's more than just taking a gourd and putting something on it. There's a lot of process to it, a lot of thought behind it, a lot of work goes into it, but a lot of joy comes from it, and I would like people to enjoy them the way that I do. 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