Michelangelo of Trees

Where the ordinary eye sees leaves, trees, and branches, CGU groundskeeper Roberto Madrigal sees monkeys, snakes, and bears. Like a modern-day Michelangelo, he simply releases the form by carving away the excess.

Madrigal was recently found on a summer morning with a crew of men on the grounds of Honnold Library. Mounds of freshly dug dirt lay along a 20-foot trench. The crew was preparing for pipe that would soon carry high-speed Internet connections—global digital data, flying at the rate of two millibytes per second.

Steps away, yet worlds removed from this gateway to high technology, Roberto pulled a carefully shrouded work in progress from a small motorized cart. The little wooden puppet had a lank, limber quality. Sitting bolt upright, it looked as if it might spring to life at any moment. Pink striations suggested a familiar grain of wood. Maple, teak, burl? It turned out to be tree root, pepper tree to be exact, its wood still damp and cool to the touch. When Madrigal first spotted this particular root with its stubby L-shaped sprout, he immediately recognized a potential Pinocchio.

Roberto Madrigal has worked at the university for 15 years. During that time, he has created more than 400 statues, put a son through college, and held three major exhibitions, at Garrison Theater, Pitzer College, and the DA Center for the Arts in Pomona. Pelicans, monkeys, and elephants grace the homes and offices of several professors. Roberto has proudly given away many pieces to faculty and admirers.

His tools are gnarled wooden mallets, a little like a sixteenth-century artisan might have used. His tool of choice is a weathered Old-Timer pocket-knife and an occasional chain saw for larger works, like the 500-pound California black bear, his personal tribute to the two Pomona College students killed by the falling tree in 1997, or the fierce, no-nonsense sheriff standing guard in the lobby of the security building.

John Regan is an anthropologist and professor of education. He studies and teaches semiotics—the interpretation of signs or visual intelligence. From a purely academic aspect, Regan finds Madrigal’s work astonishing, particularly in its brilliant sense of form and inherently creative spatial composition.

“Roberto Madrigal is a fascinating study, a brilliant example of human semiotic potential,” says Regan. “He perceives physical form as a creative medium, something humorous, beautiful, and innately creative. He is a pure artist, creating for the sheer joy of it.”

Regan compares Madrigal’s unique perceptual ability to famous sculptors whose groundbreaking perceptions changed art forever. “Rodin broke into the art world with a concept that didn’t exist before. He began by perceiving people untethered in the conventional sense. Later, Degas saw form, spinning, balanced on a single point. Madrigal’s art comes from a similar kind of perception.”

When construction crews started breaking ground for the Burkle building, Madrigal would sift through truckloads of debris as it came out of the ground, taking it home to create art. “He is a marvelous, pleasant, generous man, that rare joyful human being, because he is forever creating,” remarks Regan.

Deepak Shimkhada, faculty support for the Drucker School and lecturer in philosophy at Claremont McKenna College, has been following Madrigal’s work for many years. Shimkhada is writing about Madrigal’s unique artistic achievements as a part of a doctoral dissertation on perception. “He has almost a third eye,” Shimkhada notes. “He sees images where we fail to see. He has the ability to create an amazing figure, going directly to the form, without sketching.”

Much of Madrigal’s work retains the original texture: bark becomes fur on a wild coyote or the cascading headdress of a proud Native American chief. The stem of an agave plant becomes the curvature of canvas on a pioneer’s covered wagon. Shimkhada sees a Jungian influence in Madrigal’s art, the unconscious bringing forward evocative images from his past, “the figures reflective of childhood memories in a Mexican village where cows and bulls roamed freely.”

Madrigal may have first been inspired by the carved rock temple faces in his home town of Jiquilpan, Mexico. Like many villagers, his family didn’t have much money. As a boy he began carving to make his own toys, then continued just to earn a little money.

Madrigal’s son, Marco, is also an artist. Where his father’s media are oak, orange, and lemon trees, roots, and eucalyptus, Marco Madrigal paints with oils in hot reds and vibrant golds on large canvases with titles like, “Midnight Infidelity.”Marco is a 1998 graduate of Pitzer College with a degree in studio art. His paintings have an abstract sculptural quality, an almost evolutionary link to his father’s statues. Marco says, “My dad has always been very generous and given his work away. He has an eye for seeing what’s already there. He has always done it for the pure pleasure of creativity, finding life in life itself.”

Almost any day of the week, a happy, creative figure in a floppy straw hat can be seen driving a little motorized cart around campus, looking up toward the sky, finding animals hidden in branches, art disguised as trees. Is it a monkey, a tiger, Geppeto?