Meet Our Featured Artist
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Introducing Lynda Smith
Our Featured Artist for the spring 2025 issue, Lynda Smith from Dripping Springs, Texas has been creating gourd art for more than 30 years. Her entry for the Mixed Media theme, a vessel with an art nouveaux dragonfly, combines woodburning, filigree carving, alcohol based leather dyes, and acrylic paints. Lynda has entered The Gourd Magazine’s Crafting Contest numerous times, earning several 2nd place finishes and one 3rd place. Her winning entry also earned “Best of Division/Mixed Media” at the Texas Gourd Show. Lynda’s love of creating began at an early age. Her mother enjoyed making things by hand, from sewing to Christmas crafts, with Lynda by her side. They used materials found in the natural world that surrounded their home in rural upstate New York, such as leaves and artist’s fungi. Leather dyes are Lynda’s preferred coloration for her gourds. She became quite comfortable working with them on her many leatherworking projects over the years. She knows the color effects she can get with them and knows how to vary the shades each dye can achieve. She also uses acrylic paints when she wants a more opaque effect for a gourd project. It’s no surprise that many of Lynda’s Southwest gourd designs feature horses. She got her first horse, Honey, at age 62 and still makes a horse part of her daily life. She is quite candid in saying that her horse comes before her gourd art! When she starts working on a new gourd Lynda sometimes has a plan in mind from start to finish as she did with the Storyteller Gourd. Other times she will start with an idea, often after seeing a certain horse. In this piece Lynda started by carving the horse heads and used Apoxie Sculpt to make their manes. At that point she wasn’t sure where she was going with the piece so she set it aside. Lynda’s use of horse designs on her gourds and her love of wood carving may be related to her long held fascination with carousel horses. To experience these huge wooden horses, often done by carvers from Germany, she has travelled to various places in the east including Elmira, Binghamton, and Syracuse, New York, and to Hershey Park in Pennsylvania. Lynda loves sculpting on gourds and frequently uses Apoxie Sculpt to add dimension and character to her mixed media gourds. When using Apoxie Sculpt she works quickly since it dries in less than an hour, sometimes even faster. This was especially important when working on the gourd she calls “Woman Pouring Water.” Apoxie Sculpt is heavy when it dries, and the woman’s braids dried even faster since they were made thin enough not to cause the gourd to topple over. Not all of Lynda’s gourd projects are successful. Lynda tried Das air hardening sculpting clay, a medium similar to Apoxie Sculpt, using it to create a face on a gourd. It looked great in progress, but when it dried the Das did not adhere to the gourd and the face fell off. Lynda doesn’t grow her own gourds since the climate in her area is too hot and dry to yield gourds with thick shells. The first time Lynda bought gourds she drove a van to a small town gourd farm known as West Texas Gourd Farm. There she stuffed the van with gourds then returned home to craft them. Despite its name, the West Texas farm was in East Texas! These days she prefers to buy gourds online from Wuertz and Welburn Gourd Farms because they are predictable. Lynda’s studio is a spacious MIL apartment over her garage that was redone to accommodate her needs as a gourd artist. It has a bathroom, water, power and a balcony where she cuts gourds and sprays them. When she gets tired she just covers her paints and cleans up, rather than having to put everything away. Lynda’s studio space allows her to move among several projects at the same time. For more than 30 years Lynda has been a member of 2 Gourd Patches, the Dallas and the Capital of Texas. At each monthly meeting of the Capital of Texas Patch they all make the same project with each monthly project taught by a different patch member. They share ideas and problem solve as they paint, carve and woodburn. Lynda’s gourds are regularly displayed at the Art on 12 Gallery in the nearby city of Wimberley. When she sells her gourd art it is usually through a gallery or by word of mouth as she does not maintain a website or other online presence. 
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