PRINTVan Gogh of gourds
Paint, meet plant
LINDSAY BARNES
Melynda Lotven is currently finishing two large-scale artworks: gourds of Silver Dollar City and The Wizard of Oz. Her Oz gourd opens like the Emerald City to reveal a gourd Munchkin Land inside.
February 15, 2007 | 12:00 a.m. CST
Columbia artist Melynda Lotven never lacks creativity or a starting point. “I look at the gourd, and — oh, my gosh — it’s a flamingo!” she says. Lotven sculpts and paints gourds for a living, and her quirky, organic artwork has brought her national recognition.
One of her largest gourds depicts The Wizard of Oz. Lotven painted Munchkin Land on the gourd’s outer shell and cut two doors to reveal the inside. She crafted a bridge, rainbow and yellow brick road out of gourd pieces to place inside.
What: Craft Lab segment featuring Melynda Lotven
When: Feb. 16 noon, March 16 4:30 p.m. and March 22 noon
Where: DIY TV
Inedible etymology
What the heck is a gourd, anyway? There’s no simple answer. So we picked three.
From The Complete Book of Gourd Craft
Members of the Cucureitaceae family that produce a hard shell of durable fruit “grown for ornament and general interest.” The family has more than 1,000 species, and most have a vine with both male and female blossoms.
From Webster’s Dictionary
Any of the ornamental, inedible fruits or related plants, especially of a yellow-flowered variety of the pumpkin.
From gourd artist Melynda Lotven
“I call them God’s first pottery,” she says. Gourds break into two groups: soft shell and hard shell. Soft-shell gourds include pumpkins and squash. Hard-shell gourds, made of 90 percent water, can be dried and cured. This process can take between six months and one year. After that, the gourd is ready for Lotven’s sculpting and painting. And thanks to their nature of multiplying, she’s never without gourds to transform: “They grow like Jack and the beanstalk.”
DIY TV will feature Lotven in a Craft Lab segment three times over the next two months, starting Feb. 16. The segment will be syndicated on HGTV. The largest gourd Lotven ever painted is closer to home. The Columbia in the Round gourd is on permanent display at the Columbia Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Lorah Steiner, executive director of the bureau, says their office and the Chamber of Commerce have purchased a piece of local art annually for the past 15 years. In 2006, they chose Lotven’s gourd.
“The bureau’s employees saw it at the Art League and fell in love with it,” she says. They paid $900 for Lotven’s unique piece of art, $100 more than they normally budget.
After the gourd sat in her house for nine months, she realized the 70-inch circumference gourd had to become Columbia’s landscape. The gourd’s shell was large enough for an array of historical buildings and landmarks, such as Jesse Hall, the Heidelberg and the columns. The flat bottom of the gourd, which is displayed over a mirror, fits a map of the city.
Lotven keeps thousands of gourds, which she purchases from a handful of mostly mid-Missouri farmers, stocked at home, the clean gourds inside her house and the dirty ones outside. How does Lotven’s family feel about sharing their house with thousands of pumpkin-like plants? “They think I’m out of my gourd,” Lotven says, laughing.
When sculpting gourds, the artist has to keep safety in mind. The most dangerous component of Lotven’s work is gourd dust. She wears a mask when she cuts and sands gourds. Inhaling dust over time might result in serious respiratory illnesses.
Lotven has evolved as an artist since she began painting gourds, and looking back at old work makes her hide her face and laugh. She once saw a whole row of finished gourds that Columbia resident Ellie Saitta had collected and remembers wincing because her skills have since improved.
“I have no clue what people think of me,” she says. “I think I am very successful in a lot of ways, for I wake up every day doing what I love to do.”
Karsten Ewald, president of the Columbia Art League Board of Directors, says Lotven fills a niche that combines craft and fine art. “She is very well-received,” Ewald says.
Lotven has also written books on gourd art, produced DVDs and has appeared in TV segments of Pepper and Friends for more than a decade.
She first appeared on DIY TV’s Craft Lab in October 2006. Producers invited her after seeing her work on the Internet. Lotven says she felt at home in the camera’s spotlight. The only problem: Her tools didn’t arrive with the other eight boxes of gourds, so Lotven had to rewrite her segment on the spot. The tools showed up more than an hour before taping began, but it was too late to change the script back.
DIY TV will re-air that original segment, which features Lotven’s retro gourd lamp, hanging gourd mirror and gourd sneaker, on Feb. 16, March 16 and March 22.
Lotven says she never stops seeking improvement in her art. She explains her philosophy of growing as an artist through the example of a growing gourd.
“It reaches and stretches, reaches and stretches,” Lotven says, as her hands imitate a gourd’s vine climbing higher and higher. Then she leans to the right, and the imaginary gourd stretches sideways: “And you’ll never know where it will go next.”
Twitter
Facebook
