I’m very happy to present this many years overdue interview with John Joyce of Scarab Body Arts. It’s a long read, but worth it — I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I did. Click through to read it now, and come on back here to comment.
Continuing this discussion of mainstreaming, I’m in 7/11 this morning and they have a new energy drink called “Inked”. It’s got a faux-tribal border, a “rock” font, and a neo-Japanese wave in the middle, and the flavor is called “Razzle Dazzle” — could there be a more embarrassing name? It’s as if they’re making fun of you for buying it. I’m reminded of the scene in Family Guy where Lois is running for mayor, and realizes that just by saying “9-11″ and “Jesus” and “terrorists” Giuliani-style, all of a suddenly the crowd starts cheering and buys whatever she’s saying… What, are tattoo fans so gullible that they’ll buy an energy drink just because it says “cool razzle dazzle tatties” on it?*
* Yes, I bought it. It tastes like a sort of watered down “Tahiti Treat”.
I thought that given some of the recent debate about mainstreaming and so on that this might be a good opportunity to post an interview with queer/leather/biker outlaw tattoo artist Jacki Randall. Click through for the interview, come on back to comment.
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Jacki Randall is a self-taught artist and tattooist working at her shop Charm City Tattoo in Baltimore. She’s had shows at the Harrisburg Museum of Art, Pendragon & Fontanne Galleries, the Nat’l Cathedral College of Preachers, and other venues, and her publications have been widely seen including in International Tattoo Art, On Our Backs, and Independent Biker, and she’s been publishing lesbian-themed cartoons professionally for twenty-seven years now. You can see a porfolio of her tattoos on BME, as well as visiting her at Charm City Tattoo.com. In this age of slickly presented superstar artists like Kat Von D (with all due respect to Kat’s
BME: Have you always been an artist? My mother had saved a drawing of our Amazon Parrot I made at eighteen months… I don’t recall doing it, but I don’t ever remember not drawing. BME: What did your mother think of tattooing and how did you get into it? My parents had a very biased, narrow view of tattoos and tattooing. They didn’t understand it at all. Over the years I’ve become personally acquainted with their stereotypes, but I don’t identify with them. As a kid I’d see tattoos sporadically. Like most parents, my folks tried to protect me from interesting things. In elementary school, I was the one handed the marker and begged to draw the skull and dagger on your arm. My attention wasn’t focused on tattooing till one day as a teenager I realized I had to have one. BME: Tell me about your first tattoo? I was working on a surrealistic painting, having been dazzled for the first time by Max Ernst & Man Ray, and needed a planet to balance the continuity. I loved the asteroid belts of Saturn, but not the planetary association with hardship, restriction, limitation, status quo. What I embraced were the qualities represented by Uranus; genius, revolution, invention, electricity. So I put Uranus in my painting, giving this planet asteroid belts. Two weeks later UPI radio news broadcasted that an asteroid belt had, in fact, been discovered around Uranus. So there’s tattoo #1… BME: What made you decide to start tattooing people? Initially the idea of being so intimate and personal with strangers put me off, but as I got older and became adequately spooky, saw past it and connected with the sacred underlining. Money is no reason to devote your life to anything. Greed ruins every and anything. Before actively engaging in tattooing, I studied whatever I could get my hands on regarding disease control. I’d known AIDS casualties, and the ugly probabilities scared the hell out of me. I was living in Frisco at the time. I found tattoos by artists and now-obscure books particularly inspiring. I nearly burned my place down building and sterilizing needles. Some company put out this cheap slab jig, and I used that and upholstery thread (with my teeth) to build needles. I destroyed three perfectly good soldering guns. My partner had to leave the apartment for hours at a time. That was OK…we were on the same block as the Bathhouse.
My cartoon ‘Urban Hell’ (above) is patterned very closely after my apartment building. Those people were real. The spooky thing about cartoons is who and what they conjure up. SoMa’s where the speaking canvasses started approaching me. Painting and drawing can be lonely, so it was a refreshing change. This provided a good place to be underground, the cover was so flamboyant. BME: Who are your influences? An incomplete list of influences include Maxfield Parrish, Ub Iwerks, Greg Irons, Spain, Rick Griffin, Romaine Brooks, Imogene Cunningham, Claude Monet, Lalique, Tiffany, Mucha, Warhol, Solanis, Holzer, Thompson, Cayce, Vivien, Barney, Cookie Mueller, Robin Morgan; of course, music & film, etc…. Especially music – must have good music for tattooing. In tattooing the finest illumination happens when you’re in the zone where the work speaks to you, as in any art.
BME: What sorts of tattooing do you most enjoy? I enjoy anything I can use as a vehicle. Bizarre and intelligent clients are the most fun. Beautiful subject matter is always desireable. Most of my fun pieces were drafted on the spot; Winnie the Shit, DeathChef, Bongstoner, Notre Dyke, PMS Skull/RudeGirl for example.
Most bizarre? The Holy Royal Cheeseburger, Prune Juice Dominatrix, Goddess Kali disemboweling a hermarphrodite…won’t see that everyday, even now! From time to time, I have just picked up the machine and worked ‘cold’, but that’s on the very few who know me well. There seems to be a consensus of tattooists who don’t understand the term ‘freehand’. My understanding from the old farts who worked thirty and forty years or more, was that anything drawn on the skin, then tattooed, is Freehand. BME: Tell me about some of your experiences as a tattoo artist? I can’t say which stories are more absurd; accounts of tattooists, patrons, hangers-on or spectators. People setting themselves on fire, dancing in the work area with swords, bullets through the floor, junkies, nude drunks, perverts, obscene calls from slumber parties and shut-ins, street people en route to the drunk tank, bored troublemakers looking for places to be ejected from, winos, smelly lawyers, cops wanting to be gangsters, convicts, psuedointellectuals obsessed by ‘coolness’, clients automatically regressing to previous lifetimes, lewd geriatric exhibitionists, sufferers of psychopathia loquatia, ‘performance artists’, gamey tweakers, ghosts of dead artists, etc…ad nauseum… I must’ve called this up with the ‘Telling Them What They Want to Hear’ ’toon…
It is because of these abysmal work conditions I am only now getting around to doing what I am capable of. There was this nasty, arrogant gal who looked down her nose while informing me that I I recall a hanger-on who told one tall tale after another. Couldn’t help himself. He finally embarrassed himself gone as soon as he realized no one was buying his shit about being contracted by the gov’t to design a special tattoo machine. Like his ’48 Knucklehead wasn’t embarrassing enough. BME: What do you think of the tattoo “reality” shows? I consider the tattoo shows to be unwatchable crap. Every time you hear ‘reality’, get ready for scripted soap operas. If I had a buck for every time in the 90’s I said; “..one of these days they’ll make a show out of this…” But a shoot where I worked could only safely be nestled between Taxicab Confessions and OZ. I watched the occult, motorcycles, feminism, culture, lesbianism, and more get co-opted, assimilated, pasteurized, sterilized, homogenized, sanitized, neutralized, bastardized and misrepresented, made palatable, and packaged for mass-consumption; why would tattooing be any different?
All part of the New World Odor pushing us ever nearer to ‘Armageddon’ (courtesy; The ‘faith’ industry) and the peasant/aristocracy model endorsed by Caligula on the Potomac. Marketing/programming is sponsored by financiers who support the three guys who own the media and approved by the lords of the mcprisons, insurance, medical, and pharmaceutical behemoths. If you can get it at the mall is it still desirable? BME: Do you turn people away? Of course I turn people away; No business is better than bad business. But who am I to judge? I’m the person who refuses the act of holding humanity back by propagating ignorance and hatred. In regard to hands, faces, etc., it’s only responsible to let them know what their limitations will be. BME: What is Art? What is Art? People proudly flaunt hideous tattoos as though they were Michaelangelos. “What is Art” is subjective, and political.
Some of what I love are; creating, museums, guitars, birds, archeology, locomotives, stained glass, anthropology, forensics, astrology, thunderstorms, occult sciences, paranormal phenomenon, culture, history, and my partner of nearly twenty years, Robin.
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You may have seen this shot on the cover, but I liked this work (from Dayaks in Mexico City) so much that I wanted to feature it here as well — the blackwork with what I assume is whitework on top just looks amazing (although I may be mistaken and it could be cutting over blackwork).
Speaking of Gauge at Golden Eagle Tattoo in Santa Barbara, they also sent in these shots of a webbed toe piercing. It’s really quite remarkable to me just how many have been posted. With these being common, I wonder why I’ve only seen one semi-permanent behind-the-knuckle hand piercing (ie. a “crucifixion” piercing that travels from the palm to the back of the hand, through the sweet spot right behind the knuckle), done about fifteen years ago by Mark Pantalone if I remember right (does anyone have the issue of, I think, In The Flesh magazine that featured it?)…
I’m a little worried about the bottom hole in this S-shaped 12ga industrial, but in general I very much like the placement. It was done by Savannah Walker at Freaky’s Tattoo and Body Piercing in Glendale, Colorado. Whenever I interview piercers, almost every one says that their favorite piercings to do are “ear projects”… After the break are a couple more nice (but not over-the-top) industrials, these ones by the aptly-named Gauge at Golden Eagle Tattoo in Santa Barbara, California.
Newwound has just opened up a studio of his own, Third Eye Tattoo in Melbourne, Australia, and recently did a DIY cutting on himself of the classic BME logo — this took him four hours to do. There’s a finished photo after the break. Because of all the curves and linework, it can’t have been an easy piece to do DIY with good consistency — from his post on it:
I nearly passed out a couple of times — I’ve never actually passed out… It hurt a wee bit, and I all most didn’t finish it. I was shaking for the last hour or so, but still, I think I did good… Some lines aren’t finished I’ve only really just noticed and a few dodgey bits, but hey. I learnt a lot like — what a four hour session is like, and tight curves are hard and need to be done kinda slowly, the inside for your leg really really hurts, and I’m in control. I’m pretty sure the bigger part of me was telling me to not do it, do it smaller, do two sessions and please stop.
This gorgeous piece on Kannas is freehand by Denise De La Cerda (concept by Eric Lownestein), with a floral species specific to hummingbirds.
I’ve seen so many kids tattooing their friends and family, either directly, or even just having their drawings applied that I almost think I need to dedicate a section to it. Brett and Mike went on weekend trip, and Brett got a tattoo from a diminutive source… He writes,
“My friends Bob and Joy Roughton were at the show — I used to work with Bob down in Newport Beach and in Pico Rivera for a while. I was at their wedding, and have known their son Kai since his birth. I knew Kai had tattooed his name on Bob about two years ago, but when I got to the show on Friday I found out he was preparing to tattoo his uncle Al. I joked around with him about what his hourly rate was and all that stuff, and was really impressed with his maturity. I started honestly considering getting tattooed by him. Of my friends that I’ve made since being in California, the Roughtons/Garcias have been a few of the dearest. We don’t see each other often because they moved up to Oregon, but I would definitely put them on my list of trustworthy family. I just didn’t have a clue what I would get tattooed by Kai if I did let him do it.
As the weekend progressed I met some nice folks from Hayward, CA that work at a shop called Black Wing. They were all a lot of fun to hang out with, and for a while our whole booth took turns playing with their children Lili and Jens. They had a big bag of prehistoric animals and I kept thinking about how the sabertooth cats actually resembled a werewolf head I used to draw as a small child. By the end of the weekend I decided that was the image Kai would tattoo. It was a lot of fun, and his parents did as much as they could to not stifle Kai’s natural ability. That is of course a very kind way of saying my tattoo is extremely shaky and looks like a character from the squiggle-vision cartoon Dr. Katz. But come on people, do you think I expected a six year old to tattoo clean lines with a machine that weighs almost as much as him? Hahaha. I had Kai sign the piece and paid him for his work — I had found out that back home someone broke into their car and stole his video games, and thought maybe this would help replace one or two. Lots of people got video and photos and I entered the piece in Tattoo of the Day context just so Kai could get a little recognition and feel special. He’s a really awesome kid — so much so that the promoters made a special ‘Best tattoo by an artist under twelve’ category which of course he won, being the only one present that fit the criteria.”
I like Mike’s facial stripe as well!
