Ndesign: Lundy Cupp, Lundy Cupp Art

The playful bio on artist Lundy Cupp’s Instagram page says, “Livin’ the dream…or nightmare…they blur sometimes. Livin’ the blur.”

It’s easy to see what the Nashville-based carver is talking about — especially in late fall, when Lundy’s cup runneth over with gorgeously ghoulish three-dimensional portraits dredged from his imagination and carved into pumpkin flesh.

A recurring guest at Cheekwood Estate & Gardens’ annual Halloween and harvest festivities, Lundy seasonally dazzles with carving demonstrations, in which he sculpts an eerily lifelike chorus of jack-o’-lanterns. No rough-hewn triangle eyes and square-toothed smiles here. Nor the precision technology of CNC cutters. Using traditional tools of a timeless trade, Lundy hand-chisels and saws an autumnally orange cast of characters, ranging from the historical to the mythological.

“I show up with a bunch of pumpkins to be Lundy Scissorhands and do my 3D thing,” says the jovial self-taught carver, who arrived in Nashville in the mid-1980s to play music, before moving into a career as a private-sector criminal fraud investigator and fugitive recovery agent.

Growing up in Chicago and Minnesota, Lundy was never an artistically skilled drawer, so he surprised himself when he first chiseled away at a decaying log on his Cheatham County property to reveal the realistic form of campfire flames. That’s when he knew he had an aptitude for visualizing images in three dimensions. And it’s when he gave up the high-pressure business of bounty hunting to pursue carving full time.

From that first fiery form, Lundy has built a résumé as a master carver in multiple media, from decorative gourds to golf balls to vintage books. “I’ll try carving anything,” Lundy says. 

From rough branches and stumps, Lundy extracts intricate forms, including dragons, elves, former presidents, Albert Einstein and Santa Claus. From the sturdy grain of a fallen black walnut tree, Lundy coaxed the graceful equestrian bust of “The Filly.” From outdated sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica, he produced three-dimensional portraits of Leonardo da Vinci and Abraham Lincoln — in both cases, exposing the reference texts from pages related to his subjects. From a fallen oak tree, Lundy carved an owl perched on a pile of books above a wizard and a dragon. The 12-foot tower now stands in front of the library in his adopted hometown of Kingston Springs.

This year at Cheekwood, Lundy began a multi-year project to sculpt faces into as many as 2,000 pumpkins made from dense carvable foam so they can be reused year after year. So far, he has created approximately 350 of the so-called “funkins,” including more than 150 stacked in the towering jack-o’-lantern topiary in the Bradford Robertson Color Garden. Now that Halloween has passed, he will continue to build the “funkin” inventory for expanded displays in Cheekwood’s harvest festivities in the coming years.

Outside of jack-o’-lantern season, Lundy’s art has been featured in galleries — including a solo show at the Ensworth Frist Campus — and on Nashville PBS shows Tennessee Crossroads and Tennessee’s Wild Side, among other broadcasts and publications. In 2016, he authored Realistic Pumpkin Carving: 24 Spooky, Scary, and Spine-Chilling Designs, a step-by-step manual for DIY pumpkin carvers who want to try their hand at Lundy’s formidable designs.