Not your ordinary garden vegetable

Every month the LDecore Gallery at 428 North Park NE in Grand Rapids chooses a featured artist to promote. For August, that artist is Karen Hundt-Brow, a gourd artist of local and state-wide acclaim.

Having worked with gourds for 13 years, both as an artist and a teacher, Hundt-Brown is a gradutate of Kendall College of Art and Design. She has also published a guide to gourd art entitled " Beyond Basics: Advanced Gourd Art", from Sterling Publishing.

Hunt-Brow began working with gourds after a day home sick from work inspired her to order gourd seeds along with her usual assortment of spring vegetables. This began a process of experimenting and researching how to work with the gourds, and eventually led to a discovery of a medium that Hunt-Brow finds artistically freeing, according to her website.

LDecore will feature an open house of her work August 29th from 5-8 p.m.