Tattooing is now featured in major museum exhibitions. In the tradition of the tattoo artist, the Romantic outsider artist as a lone genius stereotype disappears and an even older tradition based on a more communal art form re-emerges. In particular the tattooist works very closely with the client, because they will be 'wearing' the images created on their body for the rest of their lives. The client is in effect, curating their skin as a developing image and the tattoo artist is working with them to do this. This is a symbiotic relationship, but of course the tattoo artist still has to have all the skills necessary, to ensure that once agreed upon, the design can be created. Skills in the use of the equipment, whether traditional or new approaches, need to be combined with excellent design skills and good hand eye co-ordination. The conceptual skills needed to create images that make us think about the human condition or that tap into deep mythic traditions, are also just as much in evidence in the world of tattoo design as they are in other art forms.
There are some overlaps with the art world. For instance Coco Loberg is an Australian artist who develops tattoo ideas by taking images from a wide range of contemporary sources. For example the sardine tattoo below, is based on one of Kate Jarvik Birch's paintings, who is an artist that lives in Salt Lake City, USA. The internet now eliminates distances and artists can tap into influences or copy images from virtually anywhere.
Sardines: Kate Jarvik Birch
Coco Loberg
Michael Craig-Martin: Sandle
1950s objects line drawing
Warhol: Shoe drawings: 1956
All these types of line drawings need to go through a process of visual simplification. Formalist thinking is therefore central to all three outputs. Hokusai would have understood this process, as it is clearly central to the production of his own stripped down drawings of everything from plants and animals to people and objects.
Hokusai
Because of the nature of Japanese art, it lends itself very easily to tattoo designs and you can find traditional Japanese images, adjusted for tattoo use in tattoo studios all over the world.
Foo dog / Fu Dog / Shi Shi / Chinese Guardian Lion by @wootattoo_1
Koi Dragon by @horisumi
Heikegani / Samurai Crab by @sootattoo_1
The tattoo designs above are recreations that exploit hybridity as a powerful inventive force. All of the studios cited above also do highly complex body and sleeve designs and as these have to wrap around arms or backs or chests, an excellent knowledge of how two dimensional forms will work when following a spatially curved surface is needed. In the tattooists' jargon this means that designs need to consider 'wrap'. An inner forearm design must consider the visual drop off at either side of the area. A wide design will appear narrower as it curves around the arm, therefore when for instance, designing for the inner forearm, it is thought of as having a flat surface from the ditch, (in tattoo jargon, the indentation behind your elbow) to the wrist, an area around 3 to 4 inches wide. Then as the surface area curves around and becomes the outer forearm, any design that is wider than 3 to 4 inches, will start to distort, the more it extends out on either side. In order to visually work with this, good tattooists locate key visual elements on a centre vertical line, well inside the 3-4 inch flat plane, locating less important details in the areas that fall away on either side. Body maps are sometimes used to help think about these issues.
Tattooist's body map: From https://www.tattoospace.com/
Tattoos are now seen as a major art form, and art galleries are beginning to think about how they can be displayed.
Tattoo. Art Under the Skin: CaixaForum: Barcelona
The ‘Tattoo. Art Under the Skin’ exhibition held at the CaixaForum art centre in Barcelona, documented tattoos past and present and explored the development of the art form as a global artistic expression.
I was as interested in how tattoos were presented as much as the various different approaches to the medium. It is a very strange thing to see a disembodied leg, standing alone in a clear perspex vitrine. Once you get past the dismembered body feeling, you then have the secondary experience of the tattoos themselves and how they combine to form a three dimensional surface. In this case the Spanish tattooist Laura Juan, shows how to combine colour and realism, in an emotively hot blend.
Laura Juan
Kari Barba
Kari Barba has made it her mission to highlight the role that women can play both as tattooists and as skins. (A skin or canvas is the tattoo jargon for someone who has been tattooed) Her scenes are dramatic, and they feel as if they could come directly out of illustrations from adventure fantasy novels. Her work was exhibited in “Tattoo: An Exhibition,” at The Natural History Museum in Los Angles, which provided a historical overview of the social and religious significance of tattoos worldwide. The museum text describing tattoo art as “a process [whose] results can be a sign of identity, a rite of passage, a type of protection, a form of medicine, a memory made visible, or a piece of art to be collected and worn on the most intimate of canvases, the human skin.”
Colin Dale
Jee Sayalero
Jee Sayalero in contrast is a post-modern artist, in the image above he combines the contemporary Japanese Nintendo game figures of Super Mario and Yoshi with a traditional Japanese tattoo design.
The Quai Branly Museum in Paris held a large exhibition of tattoo work a few years ago and this exhibition toured both the USA and Canada and in doing so raised the profile of the tattoo as an art form. This was the exhibition on which was based the “Tattoo: An Exhibition,” selection at The Natural History Museum in Los Angles, and the echoes that have been resonating out from such a prestigious series of exhibitions are yet to fade away and tattoo artists are beginning to be seen as the keepers of very important world wide folk art traditions.
An introduction to the Quai Branly Museum tattoo exhibition
My interest in tattoos has resurfaced because I have been thinking about them as a way to hold images as they pass between the inner world of the body and the exterior experiences of the world. For instance, some tattoos depict the inner body on the outer body, thus sort of making the skin invisible.
Other tattoos make you aware of the skin, but then create an illusion of the skin being opened out or pulled away to reveal what is inside the body.
I first encountered this particular aspect of the tattooist's art in Barcelona. We had been for a swim in the olympic pool on Montjuïc hill; from the hill you can look out over a magnificent view of the city and on this particular day we needed to cool off after going to the Miró Museum. At one point we were inside the building, looking down on one of the pools, it was empty except for one lone swimmer. The man was swimming lengths, very powerfully, and smoothly, using a good front crawl stroke, but what fascinated me was the fact that he had a full-sized body tattoo of the inside anatomy of his body and as he swam, his back activated illusionary muscles and bones.
Back Tattoo: Matt Doherty: Empire Tattoo Studio
I can still see the man's body in my mind as it swims, and in my chemical memory it becomes a deep metaphor for myself, the body cleaving its way through the water, cutting into the pool's blue skin, whilst the body is revealing its own inner reality as it stretches itself to its physical limit.
On the other hand some tattoos bring the outer world into the body.
Paul Owen: Naughty Needles Studio
Jolly Octopus: Christchurch
I still remember back in the mid 1960s reading Ray Bradbury's short story "The Illustrated Man", it had a deep affect on me at the time, A creepy, overweight carnival worker is given tattoos by a witch who creates images with magic needles. She tells him that they will show the future. One of his tattoos is of the man strangling his own wife, something that does come to pass and another is of the man being attacked and beaten by the other carnival workers when they realise what he has done. There is something very disturbing about the idea of the body being able to tell a story about its future life. There was also a film made based on the story, with a slightly different plot, whereby a man sees his own fate on his murderer's body.
The body can be a surface on which to place images that remind us of our encounters with the world. My grandfather had served in India during the time of the First World War and he had tattoos from his time of travelling out there; he had had one done at each port that he had docked at and so he then had a mnemonic of his experiences, which, over 30 years later, he was still able to use to help tell his grandson some amazing stories.
However, the body also tells stories about its life, without any outside interventions. The skin ages and as it does it communicates the facts of its own mortality. Certain illnesses, infections and diseases communicate their existence through the skin; eczema, psoriasis, acne, shingles, moles and fungal infections all have unique visual properties. Sometimes the skin displays pigment distribution abnormalities such as in the case of people with vitiligo and this reminds us that skin colour is simply a result of the distribution of different amounts of melanin. When someone has an irregular distribution of melanin they can in effect be more than one colour, a state that asks many questions as to why humans attach so much importance to skin colour.
Old human skin
Guttate psoriasis
Acne
Shingles
Vitiligo
The skin has its own memory, which we call 'scarring' and different cultures use this process to decorate bodies using various scarification techniques.
Operation scars
Scarification
Recent images of sunburn tattoos have been circulating on Instagram, Playboy magazine even markets its own “sun tattoo” bunny stencils, however the fine artist Dennis Oppenheim had the idea way back in 1970, when he decided to make a before and after image of himself
lying in the sun.
Reading position for second degree burn: 1970 Dennis Oppenheim
My thoughts are still coming together about this, I have yet to decide how to use these various ramblings, but I have an intuition about how inside and outside experiences, can combine to make us what we are. Somewhere in my making process I'm attuned to this instinctively, but have yet to clarify exactly what this means to me. These types of posts are a sort of edging around the subject, precursors to the main event, which is about me finally deciding what to do.
Notebook thoughts on possible use as tattoo
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