An Akinsdale man is turning heads this month by using his surgical skills to turn leaves into art.
Akinsdale resident Jorge Rizzi drew attention on Facebook earlier this month when he offered to give away several illustrations of classic cars he had carved into leaves. The leaves appeared to have been etched with acid, with large portions burned away save for the ghostly afterimages of the veins and cells and the intact parts creating an image in silhouette.
Rizzi, 54, said he started selling these carvings as a side job about a year and half ago. The carvings do not actually involve acid – just a knife and a really, really light touch.
“It’s something anyone can do, with patience,” he insists.
Married with two kids entering college this fall, Rizzi said he was a doctor in Mexico who trained others to use surgical lasers. In 2009, he and his family moved to Canada to escape violence caused by drug cartels. Canada didn’t want doctors at the time, so he immigrated as a food services worker. When his first job in Calgary fell through, he got another one in St. Albert.
Rizzi said he’d need another two years of medical school in Canada if he wanted to work as a doctor here, which he can’t afford and isn’t interested in at his age. Instead, he now works full time at Pro-Western Plastics and is working to become a Canadian citizen.
From leaf to art
Rizzi said he fell into leaf carving a few years ago when he wanted to give a friend a unique gift. The friend loved it and showed it to others, and he started doing carvings on commission in his spare time.
Rizzi said the technique he uses was inspired by leaf carvings done by Indigenous people in Mexico, and was similar to that used by some Chinese artists, although the Chinese style cuts completely through the leaf. It’s also an extension of the surgical skills he learned in medical school – he, like many students, trained to cut veins by taking a scalpel to a leaf.
Leaf carving starts with him collecting fresh and fallen leaves he finds around St. Albert.
“I like working with maple leaves because we’re in Canada,” Rizzi said, but he uses whatever he can find – his daughter often laughs at how he comes home from walks with books full of pressed leaves.
Rizzi said has to press and dry leaves for at least seven months before he works on them, as they’ll shrink otherwise. He then has to soak them for about two weeks to make the skin soft enough to cut.
“My tools are very simple,” he said, consisting of a scalpel, a brush, tweezers, a syringe for water, and sometimes a stencil.
After placing a wet leaf on a piece of glass on his kitchen table, Rizzi gently cuts, brushes, and washes away parts of the leaf’s skin to create a silhouette. Removing the skin turns the leaf transparent or translucent and makes the vein and cell structures seem to hang in the air. Most pieces take two to 10 hours, as he has to rehydrate the leaf every 45 minutes. Finished leaves are boiled to kill fungi and bacteria, pressed and dried for two weeks, and framed.
Rizzi said he’s carved everything from flowers to cars to Queen Elizabeth on his leaves. Many Mexican-Canadians ask him to carve Our Lady of Guadalupe onto a maple leaf. One of his favourite works, simply due to the look on the customer’s face when she got it, was done for a woman headed to a tournament in Australia – it had the name of the tournament and two team logos on it.
“When you give something to people that has meaning for them, it’s something I really enjoy.”
Rizzi said he enjoys making leaf art and plans to do so as long as it sells, adding that he’s agreed to provide about 24 carved leaves to area charities as a result of that Facebook post. His family is what keeps him motivated.
“Whatever I can do to give them a better life, I will do it.”
Rizzi can be reached at [email protected].
