TCR: How did you first begin working with gourds, and how did your work evolve into what you create today?

SH: About 20 years ago, I started painting pumpkins for Halloween. I'd get permission to set up outside a grocery store, and for a couple of dollars, I'd paint a face on customers’ pumpkins after they bought them. Everyone loved it! It was completely unique — this was long before grocers would ship in the truckloads of mass-produced, painted pumpkins you see today.

When I got bored with cranking out quickie faces and sitting outside Saveways, I started setting up at large fall festivals, and selling wholesale to roadside produce stands. The pumpkins evolved into elaborate caricatures, with all sorts of attachments: real hats, arms, legs, etc. I won a pumpkin painting contest one year with a full set of “California Raisin” pumpkins, wearing actual red tennis shoes and white gloves and playing toy musical instruments. These were not your father’s jack-o-lanterns! I paid 50 cents each for truckloads of pumpkins and sold them (after decorating) for as much as $35 - $50 for the large, elaborate ones.

By the early ’90s I was a permanent October fixture at a month-long, fall festival at Stoney Creek Farms in Indianapolis. Stoney Creek also grew gourds and squash, and I started painting them because of their interesting shapes. Soon I was taking custom orders for Thanksgiving pilgrims and turkeys painted on gourds, and Santas, reindeer and snowmen on butternut squash. My October venture expanded through the end of the year. Weird news travels. One Halloween, a local supermarket that employed David Letterman in his teens ordered a pumpkin portrait of Dave. Then a children’s publication, CurioCity, commissioned caricatures of Elvis, Oprah, Marilyn Monroe and Dennis Rodman on squash, and people started commissioning portraits of themselves on fresh produce. I was astonished that people were paying me so much for a painted vegetable that would rot in a few weeks! (I call that my Compost Pile period.) So, I was thrilled to discover, quite by accident, that gourds dry out and last indefinitely. Gourds are like diamonds — they last forever. An added benefit was that they weigh next to nothing after they cure. I swear I’d lost three inches in height and was becoming hunchbacked from hauling tons of pumpkins over the years. By 1994, I was using gourds exclusively.

TCR: Do you grow your own raw materials or do you purchase them from a supplier?

SH: I grow most of my gourds myself. I’m fascinated with the idea of growing my own art medium. Every canvas starts out as the same blank. But every gourd is unique, with its own personality. It tells you what it wants to become. I was hooked on growing my own the day I wandered through my gourd patch and tripped over a large banana gourd in the exact shape of Jay Leno’s head! It’s wonderful to work with an art form where the medium itself keeps you entertained.

The challenge is that I live right in the middle of a city, so my backyard gets rather interesting as the vines take it over. I have gourds hanging from the trees, and my garage gets roofed in gourds. They creep across alleys into neighbors’ yards and out into the street. Last year I put up a sign in the midst of it that said, “Armagourdden.” I’ve coerced my friends who live in rural areas into letting me grow African kettle gourds on their property.

I also can shape and design the actual medium as it grows. I’ve been experimenting with placing the tiny gourds into patterned glass bottles and vases. As they grow, they take on the exact shape of the container and the patterns are etched perfectly into the finished gourd.

The joke around the neighborhood is that I have “gourd sex” in the yard every night! Gourd vines bloom at night, when there are no insects to pollinate them, so to get a plentiful crop, they need to be fertilized. I go outside at night with a tiny paint brush, swirl it around the insides of the male blossoms to pick up pollen, then deposit the pollen in the female blossoms for what I call artificial gourdsemination!

On a serious note, it’s very gratifying to me to create art in a medium that comes right out of the Earth as truly raw material. I don’t have to buy it prepackaged from a store, carry it home in a plastic bag and wrestle it out of shrink-wrap. I can walk outside barefoot, pick my medium off the vine and connect not only with nature but also with thousands of years of rich history.

TCR: Where do you market your work?

SH: Once I learned that I had a salable product, I didn’t follow the usual course of creating art then determining its market. Because gourds lend themselves to virtually anything, I would decide what market I wanted to enter, and then create gourds that catered to that market.

For instance, I’m an animal lover, so I thought, okay, how can I get into the cat market? Cat stuff sells. How about the dog market, or maybe tropical birds? I made gourd Christmas tree ornaments with cat, dog and bird faces, I made cat beds from large African kettle gourds, cat vases, and cat and dog statuary from bottle gourds ... and started doing dog shows and cat shows. I also developed an extensive line of gourd bird caricatures – all it took was gluing a couple of gourd seeds onto the neck of an ornamental gourd for a beak, and voila, a bird. I stocked up on miniatures from Hobby Lobby and created a line of “Gourdgeous Birds” representing every possible hobby, activity and profession — doctor gourds, gourds riding bicycles, shooting a game of pool, skiing, mowing grass, sitting in a recliner with a remote control. These have been enormously successful at exotic bird fairs, and I get lots of custom orders.

I’ve also talked to the NFL about marketing a line of gourd noisemakers in team colors, where the round body of the gourd is painted as a football helmet. A large part of my business revenue comes from my birdhouses and feeders. But again, I theme these lines for specific markets. For example, my “Chateau Birdgundy” and “Chateau Cheep Chablis” have been very popular, and this fall I plan to market them to wineries. The houses are intricately painted as wineries and have roofs thatched with individual gourd seeds. They feature grape-laden artificial vines and windows displaying bottles of wine with fun labels like “Pigeon Noir” and “Catbirdnet Sauvignon.”

With gourds, the ideas are endless. Absolutely anything can be created from a gourd. You name a market, and I can use a gourd to get into it. My background as a writer has been indispensable in allowing me to make my work entertaining and to theme it for market niches.

TCR: Where can customers find your work? Do you sell through wholesale or retail shows, galleries, the Internet?

SH: At this point, the vast majority of my sales comes from custom orders and retail shows. One of my primary retail outlets is Back Home Indiana at Circle Centre Mall in Indianapolis. It’s a state-operated gallery for Indiana artists. Many states have a gallery in which they feature resident artists, and I would encourage professional crafters to explore this valuable resource. I haven’t done large wholesale shows because I really don’t want to mass-produce the same piece.

TCR: Have there been major turning points that affected your career?

SH: I’m at a major turning point right now. I left the corporate world in the early 1990s to strike out on my own as an artist and writer. This last year I’ve worked as the director of marketing for the 2002 World Hovercraft Championship, coming to the U.S. in September. Aside from considering (a line of) “hovergourds,” I’ve had to neglect my gourd art more than I like, so this has definitely hindered my business. But, the time away from it has allowed me to consider future directions.

Retail shows are lots of work, and their market reach is limited, but they’re a good market for my most creative one-of-a-kind pieces. On the other side of the coin, I don’t want to mass-produce my work. I considered selling my Christmas tree ornaments via Home Shopping Network or QVC, but producing thousands of the same piece sounds like torture to me. I want to keep producing one-of-a-kind pieces, but I’m also ready to turn my part-time crafts business into a full-time career. This is going to require finding a happy medium between what is the most satisfying creatively and what makes the most business sense.

TCR: What are the business challenges specific to artists who work with gourds?

SH: Generally, I think one of the greatest challenges for most artists is marketing their work. Most of us prefer to spend our time creating, not selling. I come from a 25-year background in marketing with some of the top corporations in the country, but if I don’t put myself on a specific work schedule, dedicating a set number of hours a week to specific marketing tasks leading to specific marketing goals, I can easily bury myself in paint and gourds and hum happily along in a right-brain creative state. That’s not money in the bank. If you want your art to be a business, you have to treat it as a business, and not just do art.

Challenges specific to gourd artists are probably not as great as they were in the past. I see a resurgence of interest in gourds. I suspect this is due to the fact that gourds get us back to nature, back to our heritage, and people long for something natural to remind us that there’s more to life than this digitized, plastic, fast-paced world we find ourselves in today.

TCR: What has been the most difficult thing you have encountered in your work?

SH: My top three difficulties have been focus, focus and focus! I’m an ‘idea person,’ so the ability to focus has never been my strong suit. And gourds are a medium that makes focus even more difficult. It’s a real challenge for me to (avoid) going off on a new whim every time I pick up a new gourd, and instead determine which directions are the wisest from both a monetary and a creative standpoint. I truly believe in “Do what you love and the money will follow,” but being successful in doing what you love still requires a business plan.

TCR: What, in terms of business, have you learned to do or not to do over the years?

SH: One thing I’ve recently learned — the hard way — is to pay attention to the legal issues. Ten years ago I started informally using the name “The Fairy Gourdmother.” Last year when I began writing my Internet column, Out of Your Gourd, on Suite101.com, I wrote under that pseudonym. Using my online articles as a first draft to submit to publishers, I wanted to write a book in the distinctive, idiosyncratic Fairy Gourdmother voice, to provide, as the intro to my columns states, “gourd craft lessons, philosophical pearls of wisdom, sprinkles of self-help, tidbits of trivia, and the occasional scathing diatribe.” Unfortunately, I discovered that another gourd artist trademarked the "Fairy Gourdmother" a couple of years ago. No matter that I’d used it for a decade — the other person held the legal trademark. To avoid being dragged kicking and screaming into court for intellectual property violation, I ran a contest to give (my persona) a new name, and in the interim wrote as The Artist Formerly Known as The Fairy Gourdmother — complete with lots of Prince puns. But my gourd craft book was predicated on writing as The Fairy Gourdmother, so I’ve had to let go of a dream because I was guilty of ignoring the legalities and treating my work as a hobby rather than a business.

It’s a constant learning process.

Another important lesson has been to create for specific markets, rather than just create what I enjoy doing. Yes, the process is important to our artistic psyches, but without sales, it’s just a hobby. I’ve done some things that were great fun to create, that are now sitting in my basement — along with The Fairy Gourdmother!

TCR: How has the Internet affected your business?

SH: If it weren’t for the Internet, I wouldn’t have been asked to do this interview. The staff of The Crafts Report found me via my Out of Your Gourd on Suite101.com. I’m convinced that having a solid Internet marketing strategy is vital for any business, not just a crafts business. It would be impossible to reach that wide an audience any other way, not even if you had millions to invest in a Superbowl TV spot. And it’s without doubt the most inexpensive and least labor-intensive way to market your work. But, it’s not enough to just set up your own Web site. People have to find it, and that takes marketing. You have to gain a thorough knowledge of Web site optimization and work on an ongoing basis to make sure your site is listed prominently with search engines. It takes lots of study to know what you’re doing, or enough money to pay someone else to do it.

TCR: What is the next step for you?

SH: First on my list of priorities is to set up my own Web site with capability for online orders. My Suite101 column is great fun and terrific publicity, but it doesn’t allow me to take orders. Second, I want to start focusing on producing a larger inventory of very elaborate, more expensive pieces. I’m a bit worn out with the show circuit, so rather than producing thousands of $30 gourds, I’d like to produce hundreds of $300 gourds, and go for a few $3,000 masterpieces. But, at the same time, I don’t want to cut off a year’s worth of bread-and-butter for one prime rib! It’s a fine line. Third, I’m in the process of selecting a few high quality catalogs to approach about marketing my themed work: a home decorating catalog for my fine art pieces, a wildlife catalog, a kitchen catalog for my “Gourdmet Chefs.” The possibilities are unlimited, so fourth, I need to focus on focusing — while still having fun! It has to be fun.

Contact Sharolyn Herring
(812) 238-1197
Gaia51@aol.com
Out of Your Gourd - Suite101.com