THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, October 23, 1995 TAG: 9510230027
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY SUSIE STOUGHTON, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: COURTLAND LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
Forrest Gump with his chocolates sits on a bench at Jack's Peanut Shack. Out back, Pocahontas and John Smith stand before a table set with the first Thanksgiving dinner.
Artist-in-residence Sharon Thomason drew their faces by brushing latex paint onto a canvas of . . . pumpkins.
Thomason, 32, has turned gourds into Mother Goose characters, pumpkins into pilgrims and winter squash into a beehive hair-do.
Thomason paints all sorts of gourds at the open-air studio - Pumpkin Land - outside Courtland, on U.S. Route 58 about an hour's drive west of Bower's Hill.
``People ask what my medium is,'' said Thomason, a Franklin homemaker who has painted pumpkin people for three years. ``I say, `It depends on the time of the year. Sometimes it's pumpkins.' ''
In other seasons, Thomason - who has little formal training - creates set designs, applies make-up for a photographer or does decorative painting on furniture.
But as summer turns to autumn, her attention turns to pumpkins.
School children come by bus to view her work - finishing touches on creations inspired by Jack and Theresa Applewhite.
On weekends, he offers free hay rides to the pumpkin patches at the rear of his farm. Each year his wife, a school cafeteria manager, dreams of new delights.
They've done storybook characters, presidents, E.T., Garfield and Charlie Brown.
``We just have a lot of fun,'' Theresa Applewhite said. ``I have so many ideas. If I just had enough hands. . . .''
This year, the scenes include an Indian village, the Apollo 13 astronauts, Cinderella, a spider house and a wedding chapel.
Inside the shed, customers munch on roasted peanuts as they pay for their pumpkins - smooth or bumpy, plain or personalized - at 20 cents a pound.
``This year, we've been really blessed,'' Theresa Applewhite said. ``We have lots of pumpkins.''
Plump ones, too. A man recently took home his family's next jack-o'-lantern - a 100-pounder.
Theresa Applewhite started the pumpkin art about 10 years ago with Mother Goose characters from a Christian story book she read to her three sons, now teenagers.
She dresses the pumpkin people in the boys' outgrown outfits.
``I save their old tennis shoes for feet,'' she said, pointing to some blue Hubbard squash painted to be California Raisins.
``And these coveralls,'' she said, straightening up the outfits. ``They were suits my little boys wore.''
Old shirts, socks and mittens become pumpkin apparel.
``We use whatever we can,'' said Theresa Applewhite, who also finds thrift store bargains, like Cinderella's dress for $1.
Black drip irrigation tubing makes arms and legs. An old pig feeder becomes a spaceship.
``We try to use everything around the farm and not buy anything, if we can help it,'' said her husband.
The trio works well together.
``I'm allergic to hay,'' said Thomason, who lets the others set up.
``And I can't paint,'' said Jack Applewhite, who builds wooden mannequins to support pumpkin heads. He makes buildings from scrap lumber, tepees out of corn stalks and animals shaped from pea vines.
And while Pumpkin Land helps sell their produce, the Applewhites say their goal is to please the kids.
``If I won the lottery,'' Jack said, ``I would plant the farm in pumpkins and invite kids to come and get them free.'' ILLUSTRATION: Mr. Potatohead and the Cabbage Patch dolls have nothing to worry
about from this farmhand. He's just a seasonal worker. Sharon
Thomason gives the gourd-geous Cavalier a nose job before hayriders
arrive to see her other creations. Thomason adds her artistic touch
to pumpkin patch creations grown on Jack and Theresa Applewhite's
farm outside of Courtland. Known as Pumpkin Land and located on U.S.
Route 58 about an hour's drive west of Bower's Hill, kids of all
ages can feast their taste buds on roasted peanuts, and their eyes
on the likes of Pocahontas and Capt. John Smith.
JOHN H. SHEALLY II
The Virginian-Pilot
by CNB