Gourd Art

Provides examples from twenty artists along with information on their tools, methods, and influences.

In gourd art, there is a vast array of material that can be used when carving and decorating a gourd. When it comes to doing the rim, the options are just as varied. The best rims are those that complement the gourd's overall design. The rim "completes" the gourd--it makes the gourd look finished. Through more than 200 color images and tutorials from contributing artists, learn how to finish the rims of gourd bowls using chip stone, tubular beading, paper, coiling, leather, wire, clay, pine needle, and flowers. The rims illustrated range from the very simple to the extremely elaborate. A gallery of completed works will inspire your own creative ideas. This book is perfect for gourd artists of all skill levels.

Coiling is a basketry technique used as decoration in gourd art. Step-by-step coiling techniques, as well as pattern designs, help gourd enthusiasts use coiled waxed linen and colored thread to enhance their work. 196 color photos show how to trim a gourd bowl or vase and use the coiled threads to add color to your favorite gourds. A special chart will help crafters design their own coiling patterns. Beginners and advanced workers with gourds will be inspired by this book.

Contains twenty easy projects using gourds to create candleholders, a birdhouse, drinking cups, bracelets, and bowls.

In this new gourd book, author Angela Mohr demonstrates how to select and prepare gourds from the garden and demonstrates basic techniques for cleaning, shaping, and fixing gourds, which then can be decorated for everyday use, such as bowls and vases.\nThis do-it-yourself how-to is perfect for any beginning gourd artisan to learn the finer points of a gourd, fix their common flaws and put the gourds to good use as accessories around the house.

The Shattered Gourd uses the lens of visual art to examine connections between the United States and the Yoruba region of western Nigeria. In Yoruba legend, the sacred Calabash of Being contained the Water of Life; when the gourd was shattered, its fragments were scattered over the ground, death invaded the world, and imperfection crept into human affairs. In more modern times, the shattered gourd has symbolized the warfare and enslavement that culminated in the black diasporas. The "re-membering" of the gourd is represented by the survival of people of African origin all over the Americas, and, in this volume, by their rediscovery of African art forms on the diaspora soil of the United States. Twentieth-century African American artists employing Yoruba images in their work have gone from protest art to the exploration and celebration of the self and the community. But because the social, economic, and political context of African art forms differs markedly from that of American culture, critical contradictions between form and meaning often appear in African American works that use African forms. In this book -- the first to treat Yoruba forms while transcending the conventional emphasis on them as folk art, focusing instead on the high art tradition -- Moyo Okediji uses nearly four dozen works to illustrate a broad thematic treatment combined with a detailed approach to individual African and African American artists. Incorporating works by such artists as Meta Warrick Fuller, Hale Woodruff, Aaron Douglas, Elizabeth Catlett, Ademola Olugebefola, Paul Keene, Jeff Donaldson, Howardena Pindell, Muneer Bahauddeen, Michelle Turner, Michael Harris, Winnie Owens-Hart, and John Biggers, the author invites the reader to envision what he describes as "the immense possibilities of the future, as the twenty-first century embraces the twentieth in a primal dance of the diasporas," a future that heralds the advent of the global as a distinct movement in art, beyond postmodernism.

Jim Widess and Ginger Summit, the best-selling authors of The Complete Book of Gourd Craft and Making Gourd Instruments, have done it again: they’ve produced another winner to delight the many crafters who work with gourds. Large, lavish, and astonishingly comprehensive, this breathtaking volume introduces every tool and every technique associated with gourd carving, offers fabulous projects that advance in difficulty, and presents a gallery of works designed to inspire. See how to choose and prepare a gourd, impress the surface with a design, and work with green gourds. The magnificent methods of decorative carving covered include fretwork, engraving, chip carving, carving with gouges, relief carving, inlay, and deep relief or sculptural carving. Throughout, color photographs of exquisite carved gourds present crafts styles from countries around the world. A Selection of the Crafters Choice Book Club.

A passionate and profane love letter to fall, the best fucking season of the year. Do you get excited at the first brisk breeze of the year? Are you overcome with delight when you see piles of red leaves? Do you lose your fucking mind at a pumpkin patch? At last, the epically funny internet sensation It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers is now a visual tour-de-force, teeming with a cornucopia of perfectly paired photos and seasonal enchantments to make it really fucking sing. Whiffy candles, wicker baskets, motherfucking gourd after gourd, and people going insane they love fall so much? Check! Also included: the equally lifechanging meditation It's Rotting Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers, because all good things must end. Give it to everyone you love, or put it on your fucking coffee table next to a pile of shellacked vegetables to really tie the room together. Perfect for: For anyone who fucking loves fall, and fans of McSweeney's, Go the Fuck to Sleep, Deep Thoughts, the Onion, and the New Yorker.