More than 40 years ago, young bass guitarist Raymond Kinman moved to North Lake Tahoe to pursue his dream of playing music. However, since he wasn’t old enough to be in the region’s casinos and nightclubs, Kinman realized he would have to pick up a day job to make ends meet. That need was accelerated when his wife came home and told him that they were expecting a baby.
“[The first sign] was trial by fire. It was torture. I didn’t even know what kind of wood to use.”- Ray Kinman
“I had no education, no skills. I could just play bass pretty fluently,” Kinman says.
He was living in Kings Beach in 1976 and hunting for work when one day he met up with a friend who was opening a new restaurant. Kinman suggested he promote his dining establishment with a nice wood-carved sign. His friend asked Kinman how to make one.
Kinman pondered and answered: “I’m a little rusty at it, but I can make one for you. I had no tools, no money, no place to work and I couldn’t draw, but I was pretty sure I could do it.”
He borrowed $30 from his dad to get the tools that he needed; tools that he still uses today.
“It was trial by fire. It was torture. I didn’t even know what kind of wood to use,” Kinman says of that first sign he made. But over time, he figured it out.
Kinman’s woodcarving business slowly took off and he ended up making quite a few signs for local businesses like Soule Domain in Kings Beach and Hacienda del Lago in Tahoe City.
“I was here during the golden period of wood-carved signs; they were everywhere,” he says.
However, 10 years later with two small children in tow, he realized that he wasn’t going to make a living in Tahoe playing music. In the mid-80s Kinman moved to Los Angeles and continued his woodcarving venture. He made more signs for local businesses in Southern California and the income continued to help support his family.
One day, Kinman went to Disneyland and naturally started looking at the signs and wondered if maybe Disney would be interested in his work. He started submitting sketches, images, designs and ideas to Walt Disney Imagineering, but never got a response.
Then one day, chance intervened. The principal graphic designer of Walt Disney Imagineering saw a wood-carved sign at a Claim Jumper restaurant in Southern California that Kinman had designed — and it was Disney that reached out to him and invited Kinman in for an interview.
“It was pure luck,” Kinman says. “I was led into this big meeting room with all of these designers and the best artists and creative minds in the world and they just grilled me. I was intimidated.”
It worked out well, however. After the meeting, they handed Kinman a blueprint of a sign they needed for their then-secret, new Disney attraction — Indiana Jones Adventure.
After finishing the mahogany wood-carved Indiana Jones display, Disney continued using Kinman to create signs for other attractions such as The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh and Splash Mountain.
Kinman missed Tahoe, though, and with his woodcarving business well established, he moved back to Northern California in 2009.
“It’s a deeply Zen process and is cheaper and might be more effective than psychotherapy,” he says.
Kinman admits that most of his work is nature themed, a direct attribution to his early days in Tahoe: “I still do a lot of pine trees.”
Today, Kinman has perfected his craft and is still doing commissioned wood signs for Disney and private parties — and he is helping pass the torch to the next generation of woodcarvers.
“I teach beginner-level, basic relief woodcarving to people who’ve never touched a piece of wood, don’t know how to draw,” Kinman says.
In his monthly three-day retreats, Kinman is amazed at what his students produce and believes they are way better woodcarvers than he is.
“My students don’t have to make the same mistakes that I did,” he says. | woodcarverguru.com
