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Only 2 more days until Halloween, so let me hurry up and post the rest of my Jack O'Lantern Spectacular jack o'lanterns! Keep in mind that these pictures represent the best of my pictures, but only a small sampling of all the pumpkin art there was to see.

Irish Setter
Many pumpkins, like this Irish Setter, utilized black paint for added contrast.

spider
Bright lights can turn pumpkins into organic Lite-Brites.

tiger
Some carvings were more elaborate than others.

King Tut
White paint and deep carvings make for a shiny, shiny pumpkin.

hydra
The Greek section had a pumpkins designed to look like urns, gods, and mythological creatures.

Woodstock and Snoopy
Not every design was horrific.

Hokusai's Wave
My art school roots are showing: The Great Wave off Kanagawa was probably my personal favorite.

Ancient Chinese secret

This amazing Chinese dragon had a tail made of scores of small pumpkins that wound between and around several large trees. It was a fantastic work that was the highlight of the exhibit. Definitely something you're unlikely to see in your neighborhood this or any year.

(If you missed it, there were more pumpkins in yesterday's post.)

[UPDATE: I should have mentioned that this year marks the 20th anniversary of my First Place finish in the 1993 Emory University Pumpkin Carving Contest. I only entered because my dormmates bragged that they could carve better pumpkins that I could. As I proved, they could not.

I thought that pumpkin was pretty good, but it didn't hold a candle to most of anything I saw in Louisville. The state of the art of pumpkin carving has come a long way in 2 decades!

(For the record, the prize was $100 to spend at the University Bookstore, and I still have the $60 sweatshirt I bought with it.)]

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I've told you that Mom and I went to Nashville, but I still haven't told you why. The real reason for our road trip wasn't to see the Vanderbilt game. No, Nashville was a mere detour from our real objective: the Jack O'Lantern Spectacular in Louisville, Kentucky.

It's hard to get 5,000 pumpkins to say 'cheese'

The Spectacular is 5,000 pumpkins arranged along a nature trail. That's a lot of jack o'lanterns. There is no way I can really convey the experience of walking a nature trail at night lit only by jack o'lanterns all around you. "Spectacular" is an appropriate word. Most impressively, So far as I could tell, none of them were duplicated.

pieface
Some stood out, even among thousands of similar carvings.

starry eyes
One of the carvers must have a thing for star-shaped eyes.

skull
This skull looked like something I might try.

splatter
There were several of these "splatter" designs, my favorite of the styles I saw repeated.

W
To me, this looks more like a pictogram than a face.

Lest I fool you into thinking that all the jack o'lanterns were the traditional kind you might find in your own neighborhood, you need to know that scattered among the more mundane carvings were a smattering of true pumpkin-carving works of art.

Nosferatu is German for 'pumpkin'

I'll showcase a few more of these later this week.

In any event, know that it was worth the trip to Louisville for the experience.

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To be continued...

 

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