Sunday, October 17, 2010
By Jeanne Starmack
Bessemer, Pa.
One person’s Atlantic Giant Pumpkin is another person’s art.
Just ask any member of the Mohawk High School Art Club. Several of them, gathered Friday at the Old Glory Square in Bessemer, were preparing to paint some of the enormous, asymmetrical creations — a collaboration between nature and a man named Jerry Snyder, a retired Mohawk elementary gym teacher who began growing them three years ago.
Those painted pumpkins, featuring scenes and characters from recent animated movies, were to be voted on for first- through eighth-place ribbons Saturday by borough residents at the second annual Bessemer Community Pumpkin Fest.
The festival itself, explained Snyder, grew from his wish to display the four pumpkins he produced last year from special seeds, fertilizers and carefully prepared soil. The pumpkins put on as many as 35 pounds a day during their peak growing period and eventually topped 1,300 pounds, he said.
Snyder called the school, said Linda Joyce, Mohawk High School art teacher and leader of the club. The club took it from there and organized the event, said Snyder.
It is just that sort of involvement in the community plus an exposure to all forms of art that nurtures club members’ general interest in it and helps them eventually focus on what they’re most passionate about — a quick survey, here, of the pumpkin painters: filmmaking, photography, computer animation and beauty school.
Some alumni have even gone on to be pastry chefs, said Joyce.
“It’s a creative thing,” said Bri Reynolds, 17, a senior and president of the club. She’ll be the one channeling her creativity into hair-styles and makeup.
“And some just do it for the fun,” added Joyce.
Jessica Sperdute, 18, a senior, drew “Despicable Me” characters on a giant squash with magic marker. The students would not be painting the pumpkins until the festival.
“I probably still would have wanted to go into art,” said Sperdute, who wants to go to Edinboro University next fall for its top-ranked animation program.
“But it helped that there’s an art club,” she continued. “We go on field trips and to museums. We’ve learned so much about art.”
Dakoda Cox, 18, back as an alumnus, already does attend Edinboro where he’s majoring in cinema and minoring in fine arts.
An aspiring filmmaker, he holds the distinction of broadening the school’s horizons to include filmmaking in its art program.
“I was the first one to bring cinema and movies into the Mohawk School District,” he said. “No one ever had the idea of filming as art projects.”
In the first three years of the program, he explained, “you get a wide variety of art — before you move on to Art IV and narrow down what you want to do.”
For him, it was movies, and two of his films won awards in the school’s yearly art show.
Helping him on the “Alice in Wonderland” pumpkin was Allie Johnson, 17, a senior. She’ll pursue photography, possibly at Slippery Rock University.
Johnson has been quite active in the club, she said — she painted pumpkins last year too.
She also worked a lot in the club’s soup-bowl project, in which members make 350 clay bowls and put on a community dinner to fight hunger in March.
Just because the festival is over, that doesn’t mean the pumpkins are gone.
They’ll be there for awhile. The biggest one, elevated to a place of honor in the middle of the square, weighs 1,407 pounds.