This is Trade Secrets, a series from The Standard that features unusual or unsung jobs around the city. Have a tip or suggestion? Email reporter Jillian D’Onfro at jdonfro@sfstandard.com.
Paulina Goff spends October sleep deprived. While most of the year she works as a paralegal, she transforms into a full-time professional pumpkin carver every fall, filling her days and nights sculpting gourds for the likes of professional sports teams and Silicon Valley’s biggest tech firms.
We’re not talking about the usual triangle-eyed jack-o-lanterns or simple silhouettes. Rather, Goff pares and shapes pumpkins into elaborate 3D figures. And the onslaught of Halloween festivities keeps her incredibly busy.
“I’ll be carving at an event, and then I get home and I’m carving custom orders and prepping for the next event,” she said. “And that’s literally what the whole month looks like.”
The San Jose artist first realized she could make money from carving as a broke 18 year-old looking on Craigslist for ways to earn extra cash. She spotted a listing for a live pumpkin carver for a CEO’s private Halloween party, submitted her art portfolio and got the gig. As she converted that 600 pound pumpkin into a funnel web spider, it dawned on her that she could turn her talents into an actual business.
Since then, Goff has spent the past 13 years developing her craft and roster of clients, whether she’s working with brands to create custom pieces with their logo, live-carving at a party or public event, or teaching pumpkin-sculpting workshops.
When she tells people she carves pumpkins professionally, the first reaction she usually gets is: “That’s a thing!?”
“People don’t know that it exists as a job, but there’s a whole community,” she said.
Goff has worked with the S.F. Giants, Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., and Jägermeister, as well as with tech firms like Apple, LinkedIn, and Yahoo. She’s appeared on the Food Network’s Road to Halloween Wars, carving a raven eating a severed hand, and worked at extravagant private parties and community gatherings.
Recently, she created a gravity-defying sculpture for a winery, a sinister scarecrow at the Winchester Mystery House, and various wildlife over seven nights of live carving at Filoli’s historic estate.
On Sunday, she spent four hours at the Ferry Building turning a 200-something-pound pumpkin into the image of a frog hugging a mushroom. As the pile of pumpkin shavings amassed around her, people stopped to admire and ask about her work. Onlookers snapped pictures and toddlers looked on in wide-eyed awe.
For pumpkins that fall in the 200-to-250-pound range she typically books four hours of live carving, while sculpting a really big pumpkin can eat up to eight hours or more.
“You’re on a time frame so you’re go go go go go,” she said. “It can get pretty exhausting. I wake up sore most mornings in October.”
It’s a mental challenge in addition to a physical one, figuring out how to build designs that don’t collapse.
“Pumpkin is so heavy, very slippery, and really hard,” Goff said, “So sometimes it’s an engineering problem, figuring out how to support the weight.”
Her work requires boxes of gear, including Exacto knives, ceramics tools like ribbons shavers, and woodcarving sets. For the real big gourds, she may need to break out the power tools.
To date, the largest pumpkin she’s carved weighed in 1,100 pounds, though she’s hoping to get her hands on the second-place winner of this year’s Half Moon Bay pumpkin contest: a 2,465-pound monstrosity. She estimates it would take three days to carve.
While Goff gets the bulk of her jobs in October, her season really starts in mid-September and extends to early December. When pumpkins aren’t available, Goff carves other fruit and veggies, including butternut squash or sweet potatoes. Her favorite artwork she’s ever sculpted — a xenomorph from “Alien” — came from whittling a giant zucchini with a carrot for its tongue.
The hardest part of her work is that pumpkins don’t grow year-round, she notes, and she’s considering applying her carving skills to sand art or ice sculpture.
“Pumpkins are so seasonal, so I want to find more ways to work on art,” she said.
When Goff gets a pumpkin gig, she works with clients to bring their specific vision to life, but her personal style is inspired by film effects from the 1980s and ‘90s. She also gets ideas from her husband and, more recently, her two kids, who love watching her work.
“It’s like the badass version of pumpkin carving,” she said of her creations. “Most of my carvings aren’t really creepy or gory, but they are kick-ass.”
The price she charges clients depends on a number of factors, including the size of the pumpkin and how late in the season she’s working (the last two weekends of October fetch the highest sums). And of course her final products are fleeting by nature.
“You’re creating something that’s going to rot,” she said.
While she’s preserved some of her favorite creations in vinegar, including an alligator skull carved from a squash, she admits there’s something special about ephemeral art: “It’s not going to last, so you gotta take as many pictures as you can.”