Takeshi Yonezawa

SPEED, POWER, PLAY: TAKESHI YONEZAWA’S LIFELIKE LEATHER ART

Written by Jennifer Perrine; Photographed by Katy Weaver

Translation assistance provided by Yuko Hardy

When encountering Takeshi “Yone” Yonezawa’s “Determination”—a life-size sculpture of a red-tailed hawk constructed entirely from leather—you might feel awe at the bird’s broad wingspan dwarfing everything else in the room, or you might be spellbound by the precision of its plumage, from the gradients of brown bars on its back to its coppery tail feathers. You might be struck by Yone’s skillfulness, tenacity, and reverence for this creature—and you’d be right. What you might not imagine, though, is that Yone describes the 2,000 hours he devoted to creating this project as “fun.”

“I love the challenge,” says Yone. “People say to me, ‘You have patience.’ No, I have passion. People think, ‘I wouldn’t want to do this,’ but I’m really having fun.”

Yone’s affection for leather began in grade school, when he played baseball and developed an appreciation for the material of the gloves and cleats he used every day. As a senior in high school, he worked in a Native American jewelry shop that also sold deerskin bags.

Although he began working with leather as a hobby in his apartment in Japan in 2001, for the next decade his primary artform was playing guitar. “I wanted to be a professional musician until I was thirty,” says Yone. “Ten years is not a short time! But the last band I was in was composed of top-level musicians, and I had to recognize that there was a gap between their technique and my own.”

As his music career was winding down, Yone chose to focus on leatherworking instead. “I really appreciate the time I spent with music because I kind of feel like I made a mistake with it. I didn’t do enough. So, with leather, I was determined to do well.”

In 2014, as Yone was making that transition, he married, and told his wife, “I can go anywhere you want, but I need my leather studio.” Their move to Portland, Oregon, brought immense change to Yone’s work.

“I used to carve using Sheridan style tooling,” says Yone. This practice, developed in Wyoming as part of saddle-making tradition, includes carving floral patterns in a flowing yet orderly fashion. Yone trained in this method in Japan, where the majority of leatherworkers practice Sheridan style. When he started entering his work in leather shows in the U.S., though, he was disappointed with the reactions to his art. “‘Your tooling is clean,’ they said. ‘You have skill.’ I could have been happy about that, but I felt something wasn’t quite right. I realized that originality is the key. It has to be one of a kind.”

Shortly after, Yone had the opportunity to carve a design for a magazine cover. He based his design on Sheridan style but chose a magnolia pattern inspired by Kamakura-bori, a form of traditional Japanese wood carving Yone describes as “powerful.” “I wanted to put this kind of power into leather.”

Rather than working from a drawing and tracing his designs, Yone carves immediately onto the leather, improvising as needed. “It’s not always perfect,” he says, “but I always like to show speed and power, and direct carving is best for that. If I draw on paper, it looks more organized. It looks clean, but not exciting.”

As Yone became more accomplished at carving, he also began to explore leather sculpture. He honored the Native American leatherwork he first encountered as a teenager by recreating a Fort Belknap Reservation warbonnet—a headdress including over 3,000 beads, 640 leather horsehair strands, and over 100 eagle feathers—entirely from leather. The project entailed months of research in which Yone studied the construction of warbonnets and the cultural and ceremonial significance of their different elements.

That project was preparation for his sculpture of the red-tailed hawk, which was eleven years in the making.

Yone first had the idea for sculpting a leather raptor when he lived in Japan, where he loved watching black kites. When he first attempted to create a bird from leather, he quickly realized he needed to focus on precision. “How big is the head? And what’s the eye color, the beak size? I didn’t know any of that.”

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While walking his dog, he started collecting feathers, which is legal in Japan, and eventually he brought those feathers to a museum to compare them to taxidermied birds, so he could identify the location of each feather on the bird’s body. This realistic rigor intensified when he began studying crow feathers under the microscope he keeps in his studio for intricate tooling. “It looked unnatural to me. It looked weird,” Yone says, laughing. “But that’s the real stuff. I started to guess, ‘Oh, they have this texture because of the airflow and aerodynamics.’”

After moving to Oregon, Yone found this type of hands-on study harder to conduct due to migratory bird protections, which prevent the collection of feathers and restrict where taxidermied birds can be displayed. Undeterred, in 2019, he turned his attention to wood bird carving through a seminar at the Vermont Raptor Academy, where he carved an eastern red-tailed hawk.

This research enabled him to create his leather hawk with such attention to detail that even ornithologists remark on its accuracy. “They’re taking care of raptors every day,” says Yone, “so it’d be easy for them to find something and say, ‘No, this is wrong.’ And then I’d have spent 2,000 hours just to make the wrong thing!”

Yone knows, though, that his meticulous work can only be appreciated fully if more people are practicing leatherworking themselves. At forty-two, Yone is one of the youngest professional practitioners of his craft, and he worries that because leatherworking isn’t often taught in schools, it might soon disappear as an artform.

When he attends trade shows, Yone teaches classes to introduce children and adults to the joy of leather arts. He’s invested in passing on techniques that might otherwise be lost, including how to create the handmade tools that have traditionally been used for leatherworking. “My friend, Robert Beard, is a great tool maker. He’s kind of a living legend. No one else does his job. I’m going to see him soon to study how to make tools. I want to carry his knowledge. I can’t carry everything—he’s a specialist—but I can carry a little bit.”

Always seeking a new challenge, Yone is also studying under the accomplished metal engraver Kendall Smith, waking up at 5:00 a.m. to practice creating metal accent pieces before his six-year-old son gets up. “I want to be a master engraver so I can engrave the parts for a bag, but metalwork is hard. If the leather is one millimeter shorter than actual size, I can just extend it. But you can’t do that with metal.”

Yone continues to seek new ways to bring his realistic precision–and sense of fun–to his upcoming projects. Alongside the handtooled wallets, passport covers, and briefcases that he sells on his website and at galleries like Portland’s Day in the Life, he also has his eyes set on more ambitious and playful creations. He’s planning another bird sculpture—a golden eagle—and a skateboard made from lacquered stingray skin. As Yone brings out a prototype skateboard, describing how he plans to make every part—down to the wheels—out of leather, he gets an impish gleam in his eye. “I’m mixing American culture with traditional Japanese techniques,” says Yone. “The stingray skin and the Japanese lacquer is actually a samurai technique they used for the sheath of the katana. But I want to use it for a skateboard!”

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10 Takeshi Yonezawa

SPEED, POWER, PLAY: TAKESHI YONEZAWA’S LIFELIKE LEATHER ART

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