La Salle artist John Kettman spent more than 20 hours turning a craft pumpkin into Dazzling Dolly the Gorgeous Gourd. The pumpkin includes metal-flake blue eyes, a yard of sequins, a wig styled by his friend and not a drop of pink.
However, the pumpkin almost didn’t get finished.
Kettman, who has been painting pumpkin portraits since 2015, wanted a break from politics. After creating a shelf of political figures such as Donald Trump, Gov. JB Pritzker, Darren Bailey and Kamala Harris, he chose Dolly Parton, who died Aug. 25.
“I put everything I got into her,” he said.
His first political gourd was a 30-pound Trump he hauled around and described as carrying a watermelon. He met Trump while carrying the pumpkin of his, and then tried to meet Hillary Clinton and Pritzker while carrying pumpkins he created of them.
About 20 pumpkins now fill a basement he plans to turn into a little museum, he said, along with portraits painted on grains of rice and an Aaron Rodgers cheesehead.
This October almost stopped Kettman from his artwork. Kettman had neck surgery Oct. 2. It went bad, causing swelling, then infection. Days after his release, he lost consciousness behind the wheel on his way to Ottawa and landed back in the hospital, this time in Peoria, delivered by ambulance down I-39.
At 3:30 a.m., unable to sleep, he started drawing the nurses and CNAs who cared for him. He also studied side-by-side photos of Parton and his pumpkin, making corrections in his head, and when he finally got home and picked the pumpkin up, the inspiration just came to him.
Kettman does research about the people he paints, and it shows. He looked up Parton’s eye color, and used metal-flake blue paint where the sun would catch it, and Kettman also learned Parton’s favorite colors: silver sparkles, white and yellow.
“You don’t put pink on Dolly Parton,” he said.
Dolly herself is a craft pumpkin, like most of the collection.
“Any brush will work, any paint will work,” he said. “The talent comes from the inside.”
The hardest part, he said, was making the pumpkin look like Dolly instead of a pumpkin.
“It’s probably one of my better ones I’ve ever done,” he said.
Whether Dolly meets the public in person this Halloween is still up in the air. Kettman hasn’t decided whether to display her outside his home for Halloween. For now, she lives at Kettman’s home waiting to be unveiled.
“I think that would be kind of nice if people wanted to see Dolly,” he said.
However, Kettman already knows where Dolly belongs.
“Dollywood would be the ultimate place that she would belong,” he said.