Dark Sentiments 2015 – Day 14: My Name is Gourd and I’ll be Your Server This Evening
Posted By Randy on October 14, 2015
Source: Villafane Studios. Click to enlarge.
No season of Dark Sentiments would be complete without our annual foray into the shenanigans and goings on perpetrated by the denizens of Villafane Studios. Always exciting and constantly honing their craft, we’ve been keeping a watchful eye on Ray Villafane and his merry band since the very beginning with DS2010.
Although they run events all the year through, right now the troupe is counting down the days to the annual Giant Pumpkin Carving Weekend at the New York Botanical Gardens, to be held this year on 24 and 25 October 2015, 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM Eastern Time daily. Overlapping the NYBG’s Dia de los Muertos weekends (24-25 October and 31 October-1 November), this year’s explosion of gourdgeosity will be themed accordingly.
Watch Master Carver Ray Villafane transform giant pumpkins into a Día de los Muertos tableau. Enjoy daily Q&A sessions with his additional carvers. From October 24 through November 1, giant pumpkins supplied by the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth will once again be on display in the Garden, some weighing more than a ton! ~ NYBG
Of course there’s a Great Pumpkin Commonwealth. We should have known.
Here’s a video profiling last year’s event, where the handsome devil at the top of this article was born.
I’ll leave you with an eye full of a few of my favourites, cherry pumpkin picked from the Villafane Studios website. Yes, those were made from real pucking fumpkins. Clicking any image will enbiggen it for a better view.
this is truly masterful work – I once watched a Japanese couple at an art show, use X-Acto knives to turn fruits and vegetables into lilies, lotus blossoms, and many other flowers that would have been impossible to tell from the real thing. Art always amazes me.
Do you recall an Artist who used to appear on some variety show. or other … considering my antiquity, it might have even been the Ed Sullivan Show. Anyway, shot from above, he would walk out onto an expanse of white paper and begin to paint on it in wide sweeping strokes of black paint applied with a large house painter's brush. It all looked like a jumble until the last moment when he would pause before making one final stroke that turned the jumble into a master work. THAT was amazing.