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Karen Hundt-Brown - Gourd Artist Karen grew up in southern Michigan on a working farm where she learned many different kinds of arts and crafts through her involvement in 4-H and her love of animals. Karen won the Golden Key art scholarship award her senior year of high school and attend Southwestern Michigan College where she studied English and art. A year later she then transferred to Kendall School of Art and Design in Grand Rapids. Where she studied illustration and photo realism for two years, but she couldn't see herself as a traditional artist and moved on. Karen spent many years looking for a medium that would allow her to show case all the different techniques she'd learned over the years. She married and moved to Alaska Michigan and started a garden where she grew gourds her first year. When the fall came around and she found 50 gourds under all the dead vines in the garden she had no idea what to do with them and went to the library to find out more about them. In the book The Complete Book of Gourd Craft by Ginger Summit and Jim Widess it told her she had six months to a year for the gourds to dry out before she could work on them. That gave her the time to read every book on gourds the Kent County library system had so when spring rolled around she was ready to start. After cleaning her gourds she made her first bowl and was hooked after that. She found gourds to be the one medium that would allow her to use many of the techniques she'd learned over the years with an endless verity of sizes and shapes to work with. Karen then went online to find out more information about gourds and to see who else was working with these natural gifts from God. There she found the American Gourd Society and all its affiliated chapters. She joined the group and found out the Ohio Chapter had an upcoming show. She wrote for a list of competition classes and found it to be much like the 4-H fairs of her youth, so she entered 22 pieces of art and that October she won 11 ribbons at her first gourd show in 1997. She still competes in several gourd shows each year as well as wood carving shows where she enters her gourd art. She's then started teaching classes in 2003 at Midwest gourd shows and out of her home. She enjoys the challenge of competition but finds teaching others the joys of gourd art far more rewarding now. Her work has been published in Beyond Basics (advanced gourd art) by Sterling Publishing and was entered in the first Art Prize contest in Grand Rapids Michigan. She has since gone on to found the Michigan Gourd Society (a chapter of the AGS) and serve as its first president. As well as having five of her lamps in the first Art Prize contest in Grand Rapids. |