I would like to tell you why many artists, who like me, have painted portraits and landscapes in oils on canvas, worked with acrylics, watercolors, and pen and ink drawings, have turned to the art of gourd carving.

Women wearing flower and sprout-like hairpins walk past an advertisement board in Beijing, China, September 25, 2015. Wearing antenna styled hairpins in the shape of various flowers and plants at scenic spots has become a new trend in Beijing. (Photo by Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters)

People inspect hookahs shaped like rifles on display for sale in a souk at the port city of Sidon, southern Lebanon, December 23, 2015. (Photo by Ali Hashisho/Reuters)

A participant of the “Zombie Takeover of Coney Island” acts like a zombie as he walks along Surf Avenue in Coney Island in the Brooklyn borough of New York, July 2, 2014. (Photo by Carlo Allegri/Reuters)

American singer-songwriter and businesswoman Beyoncé, 43, looks like she means business as she promotes her whisky brand in the first decade of October 2024. (Photo by Instagram)

An attendee wears a MAGA necklace and shirt bearing the likeness of former president Donald Trump on the third night of the Republican National Convention on Wednesday, July 17, 2024 in Milwaukee. (Photo by Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)

In this December 19, 2014 photo, a man stands beside his 1957 Chevrolet Bel-Air car in Havana, Cuba. U.S. car sales have been banned in Cuba since 1959. Cubans have been have been forced to patch together Fords, Chevrolets and Chryslers that date back to before Fidel Castro's revolution which can make it appear like the country is stuck in a 1950s time warp. Since the Communist economic system isn't likely to change soon, many of those cars will have to stay on the road for years. (Photo by Desmond Boylan/AP Photo)