A mutant gorilla warrior. An almost 700-pound haunted house. A sumo wrestler. It’s been a busy October for “master pumpkin carver” Aaron Reimschiissel. After more than 20 years, the Utahn known as “The Chizel” often doesn’t go in with a plan. Rather, “the pumpkin kind of tells me what it wants to do.”
So on Friday at a pumpkin promenade, a 400-pound Atlantic Giant whispered that it wanted to be an angry, zombie pharaoh with a big tongue sticking out.
Wide-eyed kids gasped “Woah!” as they walked by.
Reimschiissel uses clay loop tools to bring out his 3D creations. It looked like he was peeling the pumpkin like a carrot as he sculpted at Mulligans Golf and Games in South Jordan.
“It’s nostalgic,” he said as he carved a skull. “I feel like I’m just a little kid, never growing up. Just carving pumpkins, having fun.”
Pumpkin time is family time that bridges the generations, and that’s why Reimschiissel thinks it’s a popular and enduring tradition. Plus, “it’s a way for us to kind of be creative and explore some of that artistic side, whether we call ourselves artistic or not.”
Unlike most pumpkin carvings, Reimschiissel’s are all about how the light shines on the pumpkin from the outside and the shadows created by the interplay of that light and the sculpture. A jack-o’-lantern carving focuses on making cuts for the light to shine out from inside the pumpkin.
His work is more like pumpkin sculpting, he explained. And unlike normal sculpting that can add clay, it’s subtractive. Plus, pumpkins are hollow.
“This is not really that forgiving. Once you cut a piece out, it’s gone.”
He estimated the pharaoh pumpkin was about 3 feet wide and 4 inches thick. But there’s no way of knowing just how thick the wall is before making a cut, so “you’re just kind of working with a little bit of a surprise medium.”
Reimschiissel has some tricks. He can tell when he’s getting close to the center by the wiggle of the pumpkin flesh. He also uses the pumpkin’s shape to make it look thicker than it is.
When it comes to a typical home jack-o’-lantern, he said carvers should look for a pumpkin that’s lightweight for its size. It will have a thinner wall. There are also tools to scrape some of the inside out to make it thinner.
A good pumpkin for 3D work is the opposite. It needs to be heavy for its size. That means there will be more water content, which makes for better carving. Reimschiissel’s pharaoh looked like it was sweating with little water droplets beading on the surface. The zombie pharaoh also had green veins all over its ghoulish face.
“That’s what’s so fun about pumpkins, they’re all different,” he said.
You can get creative with other parts of the pumpkin when doing traditional carving. Sometimes he uses seeds as tears or the inside guts to make it look like the mouth is foaming.
Reimschiissel’s pharaoh will only last about a week out in the weather, so he took pictures from all angles. He wishes his art weren’t so ephemeral, “but also, that’s kind of what makes it fun at the same time.”
“A lot of people, they just think, ‘Oh, it doesn’t last, so I’m not gonna spend time on it,’” he said. “For me, that’s an opportunity, because I get to do something that maybe other people aren’t willing to. And I enjoy doing it.”
