'Picasso of Pumpkin Carvers' brings artistry to a Halloween tradition

HALF MOON BAY, Calif. (AP) — 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 whimsical faces and comical creatures into big pumpkins for more than four decades. Wearing his trademark orange overalls and farmer hat, he's sculpted hundreds of gourds into ghoulish faces, seaside landscapes, witches, dragons and pop culture figures such as Yoda and Charlie Brown.

Valladao doesn’t have any formal artistic training, but he's always looking for inspiration. He gets ideas from looking at art in a museum or just walking down the street.

“Sometimes I’ll look at somebody and I’ll think, oh, I like the teeth or I like ears or the way the nostrils flare," Valladao said.

This year, “Farmer Mike” celebrated 40 years of Halloween artistry at the Half Moon Bay Art & Pumpkin Festival , 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, Valladao works on stage so people can watch.

Valladao stumbled into his artistic hobby after he began growing big pumpkins at his San Jose home in the mid-1980s. He didn’t know what to do with the massive gourds, so he pulled out a knife and started slicing faces into them.

“I’m an engineer by trade 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 Valladao’s pumpkins and invited him to showcase his carving skills in Half Moon Bay, where his family opened the town’s first feed and seed store in the 19th century. He grew an 800-pound (363-kilogram) pumpkin once but it was a lot of work, so he doesn’t participate in the giant pumpkin contest.

His art has since taken him to different parts of the country, including an appearance on “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.

He uses Atlantic pumpkins that weigh from 100 to 1,000 pounds (45 to 454 kilograms). They have thick skins that allow him to cut protruding facial features shallow or deep.

“It’s really about the illusion of depth,” Valladao said. “I can make it so that it’s three-dimensional, such that the eyes are inset and the nose sticks out. So it’s a little bit of carving, but it’s just adding a little more magic to it.”

Valladao said he doesn’t 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 they’ll build character,” Valladao said.

And there's always more pumpkins to be carved.

After 40 years at Half Moon Bay, Valladao doesn’t have any plans to hang up his carving knives.

"It’s fun, it’s enjoyable and, quite frankly, it’s a piece of me," he said.