Welcome to the Tiki Central 2.0 Beta. Read the announcement
Celebrating classic and modern Polynesian Pop

Tiki Central / General Tiki / Please Fill me in on tiki artist Andres Bumatay

Post #557327 by Sabu The Coconut Boy on Fri, Oct 1, 2010 5:03 PM

You are viewing a single post. Click here to view the post in context.

On 2010-10-01 16:30, Dustycajun wrote:
I thought the Tikis at The Reef were carved by Charlie Rosencrans (who also did the the Tikis at the Royal Tahitian)?

I think Rosencrans is credited with carving tikis at the Reef, but bigbro's newspaper clipping clearly shows that Bumatay at least did the tiki out front who's image ended up on the placemat too. Probably a joint effort.

In the late 1950s, Bumatay carved tikis for the Hawaiian Garden House nursery in Long Beach. Here's an article from 1958 with two large examples of his craft:


It's interesting that the nursery's owner uses the Hawaiian word "aumakua" to describe his tikis, as "aumakua" was the word referring to the smaller carved images that Hawaiians would have in their homes, and not the large temple images similar to what Bumatay was carving. It almost sounds like in the early days of the tiki-movement the true Hawaiians didn't like the American choice of "tiki"and were trying out different monikers. I'm glad the word "tiki" stuck eventually. The examples above are absolutely beautiful. Wonder who ended up buying them.


[ Edited by: Sabu The Coconut Boy 2010-10-01 17:19 ]