Dubai – Masaader News
James O’Neal isn’t a bodybuilder, strongman, or even a fitness enthusiast for that matter. Still, fans at the 2019 Arnold Sports Festival Opens a New Window.in Columbus, Ohio were lining up to shake O’Neal’s hand and marvel at his 350-pound, oak tree sculpture of Arnold Schwarzenegger, according to muscle & fitness.
“I started carving wood about 11 years ago and doing life-sized people just three years ago,” O’Neal told us at the Greater Columbus Convention Center. “I like carving out the athletes, and trying to capture the anatomy and the muscles.”
O’Neal claims that he started with big statues from the jump, and he clearly has an aptitude for it. So far, he’s carved Conor McGregor; Arnold; Floyd Mayweather; UFC women’s featherweight fighter, Cris Cyborg; Muhammed Ali; and is working on a Sylvester Stallone sculpture.
For example, the raw statue of Arnold had hundreds of little cracks in it, which O’Neal filled by cutting tiny strips of wood to fit and hammering them in. Arnold’s top half is also made from two different pieces of wood, requiring O’Neal to bolt the pieces into place through The Austrian Oak’s armpit and chest. The abs of O’Neal’s Conor McGregor piece alone took a couple of days to complete, he says. “That’s about 20 hours of work,” O’Neal explains. “There’s a lot of comparison with pictures. I try really hard to get them to look exactly like they do in real life.”