Sneak Peek: Luis Tapia

Luis Tapia: Well, I generally start with some sort of an idea that I want to express, and that gets me started, just thinking about that. Then I have to think about, is this a man, woman, or what kind of image comes out here? So that's when you pick up the piece of wood and you start carving this wood, and I develop like a relationship with this piece. So I'm asking myself, who are you? What are you? Where do you come from? And it starts to develop. It starts to take form. So it's this conversation that I have with the material and as I work along, more things start to come into the piece. Well, what is this man holding? Why is he holding that? How do I interpret that piece into what I want to say? And so it becomes a development and these pieces can take months to finish, and they're not huge pieces. They're approximately anywhere from 18 to 24 inches high. So they're not very big. But it takes me a long time to develop the whole piece and I could be working on possibly two to three pieces at the same time, and they're all in different stages. So that if I run into a problem, and I get into an argument with the piece, well, then I can move on to the other one, and then I can get it back to the original piece.