See it: The man who turns pumpkin-carving into art

In a summer-warmed pumpkin patch, Ray Villafane finds his version of Christmas morning.

Amid fields of orange on an August day, he is kid-in-a-candy-store giddy. This annual visit marks the start of the artist's seasonal journey with his preferred medium. Villafane is a pumpkin carver.

But to call him a carver of pumpkins is akin to calling Stephen King a writer of horror stories. Villafane has, perhaps, perfected pumpkin-carving.

While the masses punch triangular holes through fibrous flesh, Villafane sculpts and molds pumpkins until they take on nearly impossible three-dimensional shapes.

That's why as leaves begin to turn, the calls start to come into Villafane's Surprise home.

It's Germany. Or Hong Kong. Or a late-night talk show. Or a Silicon Valley tycoon. From September through November, he and his creations will be requested for festivals, fairs, TV shows and private parties.

By Dec. 1, he will have shaped more than 100 pumpkins into terrifying monsters, or nightmarish visages, or — his favorite — whimsical, true-to-life faces.

But of all the things Villafane has carved out, the most important is a career.

"Most people think I could never have guessed how far pumpkin-carving could take me," Villafane said during one of his less-busy October afternoons, sandwiching two interviews around a carving.

"But I did know, because I always think of what I could do, how far I could go if I gave myself a chance to really focus on something."

His forward-looking philosophy is behind Villafane Studios, a three-man carving team headed by the founder. The company also markets various tools and accessories, including pumpkin prosthetics: vine-shaped arms and legs, eyes and enhanced stems.

When he isn't carving, Villafane is daydreaming in orange and black, thinking of ways to take Halloween to the next level. Pumpkin sculpting is just the beginning, he said. There are characters to be created, stories to be written, imaginations to be captured.

Villafane is a jack-o'-lantern of all trades who wants to make Oct. 31 as big as Dec. 25.

Which brings us back to a pumpkin patch in August.

'I love the hunt'

Each August, Villafane rents a truck and heads to Underwood Farm in Moorpark, Calif., where the first harvest is ready before the end of summer.

By then it's been eight months since he's had his knives on a pumpkin, making him feel a bit like Linus looking for the Great Pumpkin.

"It's one of my favorite days of the year," Villafane said. "I want to spend hours wandering up and down the rows looking for perfect pumpkins."

The perfect pumpkin is heavy for its size, because the best specimens must have thick skin. Villafane leans toward taller pumpkins, giving him more artistic options. But he'll also grab the short and squat, a great canvas for funny faces.

He'll choose as many as fit in the truck, anywhere from 30 to 80 (making two or three visits each year, depending on workload). And should a few eventual carving failures be included, no worries. Those will serve as donor pumpkins, providing fangs or noses or other transplants as needed.

"I try to let nothing go to waste," Villafane said.

Yet in the end, everything goes to waste.

His creations are doomed to decay, pitched into compost heaps rather than posed on pedestals. He'll labor over a pumpkin anywhere from two to eight hours, but its artistic future is predetermined.

Which is why cameras are as important to his trade as the metal tray of blades, drill punches and carving loops he keeps atop a wheeled, height-adjustable table.

Villafane also keeps an array of lights to capture the pumpkins just so, since photos are all that will be left in a matter of days, or perhaps as long as a week if they're stored in the refrigerator with wet towels wrapped around them.

His never-used studio, a small room just off the living room in his Surprise home (he prefers working in the living room or, more often, on the road), is dominated by a photo of one of his favorite creations from a few years back — a jowly face so realistic you'd swear it was a close-up of the leader of the Orange Man Group (if there were such a thing).

Villafane resigns himself to the unavoidable fact that his 3-D pumpkin creations will soon exist in only two dimensions. And he's fine with that.

"Does a musician love playing the song, or listening to it afterward?" he said. "Does a ballplayer enjoy making the play, or watching it later? I love the sculpting more than the finished product."

Even as he sits down, blades at the ready, Villafane is never sure exactly where it will go. He'll have a general idea, but may add a feature or make a cut that sends it in a different direction.

And what truly makes it magical, Villafane said, is the seasonal nature of pumpkin-carving. There is an ebb and flow rarely found in other artistic disciplines.

"If I did it all year, it would be less appealing," he said.

Which is why, amid a few months of national and international travel, of interviews and TV appearances, the pumpkin patch remains one of his favorite destinations.

"I'm just so ready to go at that point," he said. "I love the hunt."

Started out teaching

Ray Villafane didn't always work in pumpkins. He started out sculpting young minds, spending 12 years as an art teacher in northern Michigan.

He said he introduced the pumpkin as an art form to engage the kids, though his skills were only slightly beyond that of a triangle-cutter.

Pumpkins shriveled from view when, in 2003, Ray married Tammi Schmidt, each bringing two children to their family.

Tammi remained home to focus on her new tribe, urging her new husband to find an additional source of income.

"We just couldn't do it on a teacher's salary," Tammi said. "But he had his art. We wondered if there wasn't something there."

As it so happened, the family was watching a show on the making of Disney's "Mulan." Villafane recognized an old college friend who sculpted some of the film's maquettes, 3-D figures used as models by animators.

After a few phone calls and a visit to his buddy, Villafane crafted his first maquette, a study of James Logan, the Wolverine of Marvel Comics fame.

For the next three years, Villafane juggled his teaching career with that of sculptor, creating statues for comics and toy companies. In 2006 he left teaching to sculpt full time.

One day roughly a year later, Villafane logged into his website to find it unavailable. It turned out thousands of people visiting the Yahoo home page had clicked on a "How to carve a pumpkin" slideshow, sending them to Villafane's site and crashing his page.

Interesting, he thought.

Life changed for the forward-thinking artist. That year he appeared on Food Network's "Outrageous Pumpkins" challenge show, beating three contestants to win the grand prize.

In 2010, Villafane abandoned clay for pumpkin, devoting himself to the Halloween-centric craft. The seasonal carving, and the side business devoted to carving tools and pumpkin accessories, was lucrative enough to allow him to shelve his work as a sculptor of figurines. He also sells intricately carved sweet potatoes, which float in pickle jars resembling sideshow oddities.

Turning Halloween into something as big as Christmas, perhaps. Just as Santa Claus stands for Christmas, Halloween requires its own instantly recognizable mascot to elevate Halloween beyond costumes and haunted houses.

(Some might argue that mascot is Jack Skellington of Tim Burton's "The Nightmare Before Christmas," but Villafane is not among them.)

"It's about creating characters and a story," Villafane said. "Give people something to follow. A carved pumpkin is cool to look at, but if it's a pumpkin character with a story, it goes much deeper."

He envisions an animated or stop-motion film, the first steps toward a Halloween world populated by walking, talking pumpkins.

Next August, as he stands in a California pumpkin patch, he may well spy that Halloween mascot in the flesh, carving himself a spot in Halloween lore.