About the Artist: Wood Carver Extraordinaire

Leo Trujillo has been creating relief woodcarvings since joining the Dayton, OH Carvers Guild back in the early 1980's.  He has enjoyed carving or working with wood since early on. He has always had a curiosity for creating the illusion of 3D especially if it was nature or a reflection of something in his past.  Early in his career his passions and creativeness were funneled towards working with patients in his practice as an occupational therapist.  As the profession changed and his focus moved from clinic to academic work,  wood carving was put aside for a few years. Later in his  career he moved in academic life and the demands of university life did not always allow free time to engage in carving. While primarily self-taught he has never avoided learning from others.  While in Dayton, OH he signed up for a beginners course with Dick Belcher. And soon after, as a novice woodcarver,  he won an award to attend the American Wood Carving School in Wayne, NJ.  While there he added to what had come quite naturally, but now had insights from Mike Denike, master woodcarver.  In that process he learned to adopt a motto of which he reminds himself when working on a difficult piece:  “It’s only a piece of wood.  It only becomes a masterpiece when you are done with it.  If you mess up, get another piece of wood.”

Leo loves imitating nature, which is apparent in much of his work. He loves the beauty of roses and the natural beauty found in the high mountains of Colorado where you find the aspen groves and the ranch lands of Texas with the rustic windmills. He captures that beauty in many of his carvings.

Somewhat of a purist, Leo prides himself on creating relief carvings from a single piece of hardwood using only oils to protect the wood. This provides the woodcarvings with a natural looking satin finish rather than a contemporary high gloss. He loves the intricacies and difficulties of high and low relief carving. He obviously loves the fine details and authentication by imitating nature to its smallest of details. Although wood imposes and more often than not creates constraints, he enjoys facing those challenges and coming up with ways to imitate through wood. Which is what makes it all the more enjoyable and challenging. That challenge requires the ability to visualize in three dimensions and to carve the piece making use of light and shadow in a creative and interesting fashion. Sometimes you fool the mind of the onlooker into what they want to see, compared to what they actually see.

How do you do that?”
“How do you do that?” is the question Leo is most often asked about his carving; especially when one looks at the different levels and details he creates. One response he gives is “It was in my mind for months before it finally became cut into wood. But sometimes it emerges because of what the wood is telling you to do." Creating a high relief woodcarving requires a tendency to be detail oriented and a bit of a perfectionist. Yet, always having the courage just to start cutting and allow the creative process to flow.  People often want to know how long it took to carve something.  Somehow something of beauty, intricacy and with a high degree of difficulty must take lots of time. If you think of all the years that went into learning the techniques and understanding the carving process – can you really put time as a measure?

Inspiration
His inspiration for a wood relief carving comes from many directions: it is not unusual for him to stop while driving and take photos of what nature provides. Thus, many of his works reflect the time he lived in different parts of the country.  Today we are privileged to see the work of many other artists with all the images and photos on the web. They provide a large range of ideas as well as a stroll in the neighborhood or sometimes just an imaginative composite that was imagined. The original idea then morphs into reality as he mentally carves the idea over and over, the difference is finding the right tools and cuts to make his imitations of reality come to being.

One step in the process is laying out the different levels of the work. Producing a multi-level relief woodcarving requires considerable flexibility in design and implementation. Wood likes to move, particularly when relieved during the carving process.  Sometimes it moves enough to cause a warping of the piece he is working on. This is one of the hazards of carving on a single piece of wood. He carves on many different kinds of woods and each of them have their unique qualities and restrictions. 

The carving process
The carving process is difficult to explain without writing a book and sometimes getting philosophical. When asked what tools he uses it varies so much and would be easier to say if he has a tool he uses it.  With power tool handpieces to multiple hand gouges he employs hand sanding, burnishing, and scraping. Those tools include a wide variety of gouges, rifflers, dental tools, foredom drills, sandpaper and just about anything that will give life to all the levels of each element. He has found that the adopted method of using a router to remove the waste wood – really doesn’t save time and in using that process you lose the sense and feel of the wood that you will then begin adding detail to.

The high relief woodcarving is finished using a series of different finer grit sand paper on every surface, edge, nook and cranny. This takes almost as long as it does to carve it, sometimes longer. He uses mostly Danish oil,  tung oil, and sealer to enhance the natural beauty of the wood and to protect it.

As I mentioned I have taken different classes or workshops from different Woodcarving Masters: Fred Cogelow, Mike DeNike, Dick Belcher, Dave Calvo and Joe Cummings.