We all have experiences from our childhoods which stay with us our whole lives, and for me, that experience was living a mere two doors from a woods in northeast Ohio. In those days, my sister and I‒or even I, by myself‒were allowed to play there. I remember walking through that oak forest often, no matter the weather or the season. The place was pure magic. I can still see myself on a long-ago snow day rushing first thing to the freedon of the snowy forest. That all happened between 2nd and 7th grade‒truly formative years.
Some fifty-five years later, in 2011, memories of those times inspired me to create this piece of gourd art: the Trillium Fairy.
In springtime, trilliums and violets dotted the forest floor. And here, I’m imagining the fairy peeking out of her gourd home which is topped with a pinecone petal roof and shaded by a large polymer clay trillium plant.
I would have been about sixty-five years old when I created this piece, and I remember that age as a very exciting one artistically. By that time, I’d worked in several different media and was in a position to bring many of them together in a single piece. That’s exactly what happened here.
I was quite fortunate with this fairy, as her face turned out better than any others I’d done. I find it quite difficult to sculpt a human face. She's sculpted from polymer clay. Usually, I worked with Fimo Soft, but for her, I would have used a brand of polymer clay specifically for dolls, though I can’t remember what brand that was.
Her hair is a combination of eyelash yarn and fantasy fiber. As for her dress, the bodice is Ultrasuede and the skirt is mulberry bark. I trimmed the bodice with glass pearl-colored seed beads then added a black glass cabochon with a gold celtic knot design in the center. Her antennae are glass drop beads at the ends of twisted pieces of gold colored wire. Her rings are simply flat back crystals glued on her fingers.
Thankfully, since she’s glued in place in the gourd, I didn’t have to worry about the back of the clothing! The mulberry bark worked fine for the skirt in this instance, but would have been a challenge had the fairy been viewable “in the round.”
In this view, you can see the painting on the gourd better. Trilliums and violets grow around the base of her house.
Though I often forget, I prefer to sign and date my work. In this case, I made a label from polymer clay with the name of the fairy's home.
Some of the painting is pretty elaborate. I used acrylic craft paints. And in this view, you may be able to see that the gourd is carved away around the painting, which gives a nice texture.
I hope you enjoyed seeing this piece from my past. It’s been fun for me to relive the process and, as so often happens when I look carefully at things I created in the past, I’m inspired to do more of this art form which at some point I left behind. A Halloween gourd would be intriguing! Not scary, though. Just wild.
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