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GREAT PUMPKINS
When fall arrives and leaves start changing color, Mike Valladao, a systems engineer at a cybersecurity company, slips into his alter ego, “Farmer Mike,” also known as the “Picasso of Pumpkin Carvers.”
Farmer Mike has been chiseling imaginative faces and comical creatures onto big pumpkins for more than four decades.
Wearing his trademark orange overalls and farmer hat, he has sculpted hundreds of scary faces, witches, dragons, and even pop culture figures such as Yoda. And, of course...Charlie Brown.
Mike does not have any formal artistic training, but he is always looking for inspiration. He gets ideas from looking at art in a museum or just walking down the street.
“Sometimes, I will look at somebody, and I will think, ‘Oh, I like the teeth, or I like ears or the nostrils,’” Mike said.
This year, “Farmer Mike” celebrated 40 years of Halloween artistry at the Half Moon Bay Art and Pumpkin show, which is held in mid-October and is best known for its giant pumpkin weigh-off.
At the two-day festival on the coast south of San Francisco, Mike works on stage so that people can watch.
He stumbled onto his artistic hobby after he began growing big pumpkins at his San Jose, California, home in the mid-1980s. He did not know what to do with the massive things, so he pulled out a knife and started slicing faces into them.
“I am an engineer, and I tend to look at it as building something, the same way I would build a piece of hardware, one layer at a time,” he said.
In 1986, festival organizers saw a picture of Miles’s pumpkins and invited him to showcase his carving skills in Half Moon Bay, where his family had opened the town’s first feed and seed store in the 19th century.
He did grow an 800-pound (363-kilogram) pumpkin once, but it was a lot of work, so he does not participate in the giant pumpkin contest anymore.
His art has taken him to different parts of the country, including an appearance on the popular, late-night TV series, “The Tonight Show.”
He has gotten requests to carve pumpkins at venues such as the San Diego Zoo, the California Academy of Sciences, and the State Fair of Texas.
Mike uses Atlantic pumpkins that weigh from 100 to 1,000 pounds (45 to 454 kilograms). They have thick skins that allow him to carve deep features.
“It is really about the illusion of depth,” Mike said. “I can make it so that it is three-dimensional, so that the eyes are inset and the nose sticks out. It is a little bit of carving, but I just add a little more magic to it.”
Mike said he does not name his creations because he recognizes the ephemeral nature of his art, which only lasts a few days.
“It never really bothers me when a pumpkin starts to age because, in some cases, the changes build more character,” he says.
And there are always more pumpkins to be carved.
After 40 years at Half Moon Bay, Mike does not have any plans to hang up his carving knives.
“It is fun, it is enjoyable and, quite frankly, it is a piece of me,” he said.
And, probably, from the pumpkin’s point of view, going under Mike’s knife is preferable to becoming just another anonymous pie.
SOURCE: apnews.com
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