Another old post… that shows off my mad tiki-carving skills…

This one is called: Tiki Time. It also tells you a little about the weird way my head works.

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Because I am now worried that you all think I am some sort of maniac that spends all my time dissecting people in Photoshop, let’s take a little side trip through Arthurland…

You have seen  the Santa tiki I made for my wife,… (I did a post about it)… and you are less than impressed with my woodcarving skills. Oh sure, you all thought sarcastically, what wife wouldn’t want a Santa tiki, but was that the best you could do? Hey, there were time constraints. It is a busy time of the year. Also, it is easy to cast aspersions, but how many Santa tikis have you carved?

But just for the sake of argument, let’s assume I am not completely without talent… (it may be an incorrect assumption, but let’s assume it anyway)… I have the artistic vision, I have the need to express myself in wood, I even have a little Dremel tool… What I do not have is the part of the brain that goes about these things in an orderly, business-like way.

Do I Google to find out what kind of woods are best for carving, especially whatever kinds of palm trees that the South Sea Islanders use? No, I just grab logs from wherever I find them, mostly Aunt Sharon’s house up in Fallbrook. Sometimes I bring home termites and other bugs to play with the termites and bugs we already have at home. Some of these logs are so hard they take forever to carve. Some split when they dry out. Am I supposed to peel off the bark before I start? How the heck would I know… I don’t even know what kind of wood it is, usually.

Do I go and buy carving and woodworking tools? Why should I? I have a Dremel with three little tool-heads to put on it. Why on earth would I make it so I could do tikis in a fast and efficient manner? That is just crazy talk.

To be honest, it was my brother, Henry, who got me started on this particular form of artistic expression. Because, Lord knows, that was just what I needed, yet another form of artistic expression… He cut down a tree at his house, and thought he would try a tiki. We happened to be there for some family event, and I saw his work in progress. I took home a few of the bits of the tree and thought, you know, I would just play around a little, maybe one or two tikis, then quit cold-turkey…

Here is my first tiki, from my brother’s tree, which has now been almost hollowed out by the termites, so it is nice and light…

I took these pictures with my phone, so the quality could be better, but you get the idea…

I started off slowly and simply…

What about a friendly ghost tiki for Halloween…

Here is one I gave to my mom…

But my art always seems to start getting a little weird…

This one is sort of an Easter Island head, done in pine, which they would have used to make the real heads on the island, but there was no wood, so, there you go…

Some still looked a little like normal tikis…

But some of them began to grow facial hair…

Until I ended up with tiki Elvis…

I went through a Grateful Dead/skull phase, for one reason or another…

And I carved a Grateful Dead/tiki stake to put beside John’s memorial tree in the Bay Area, which I still go to visit whenever I am up there… You can go see it too, the memorial grove is by the recycling center in Albany, …(which is sort of funny, if you think about it)…

I did some big ones…

Suddenly I began to see the shapes inside the wood…

I saw faces in the wood…

I saw crazy animals in the wood… (which began to make me nervous, I can tell you, because once you start seeing faces and crazy animals in the wood, where will it end… do you have to let them all out???)…

Oh, yeah, the trees are all full of saw-toothed faces and crazy peyote-eating coyotes, and we should all be worried about that!!!…

I still do the occasional traditional tiki…

But I tend to get sidetracked…

And we must, as artists, remember to add color…

So there you have it, just another type of art to drive myself crazy with…

I don’t have pictures of some of the ones I gave away, but you get the idea. Would I like to make my family proud and make money selling my tikis? Sure I would… Is it ever going to happen? Probably not…

Here is the thing about art. When I make something sort of lame, I would be embarrassed to sell it. When I make something good, it is a part of my soul, and I would sell it, for a price that I will never get, but it would be like selling one of my children. Combine these facts with the fact that I could ship a tiki to some guy in Long Island, and get a call a few weeks later saying that termites have reduced the entire tiki into a pile of very small, round pellets, and could he have his huge amount of money back, please…

I am not cut out to be an artist, but that doesn’t mean that I am not one…