I've been very Busy this past few months. Painting after work as much as I can. I've really started to get myself into the habit of painting. It seems much less like "work" and more of a natural extension of myself now then it did when I really started to seriously paint a year ago.
I sleep maybe 6 hours a night now...which is a little less then normal for most folks but not much at all for a lot of tattooers. The days of sleeping 10 hours a days are a hazy, distant memory to me. ha!
Seems like the more driven one becomes about doing something you feel is important, or if you love something so much you require far less rest. I can only describe it as almost like being infatuated with someone. Or on days where you are tearing yourself down its almost like you've been dumped or divorced...You can't sleep, you can't think about anything else. Real pathological obsessional type stuff.
I feel like if people would just devote themselves to their passions they'd be far less caught up with the day to day grind of life.
Lately, tattooing has become easier, faster, more solid and more fun. I feel like I'm really starting to gain some clarity on things related to composition now too. Which is FUNDAMENTALLY the most important part of tattooing. The smoothness and the brightness and over all solidness is just an extension of that understanding and not the byproduct of the tools you use or the technical trickery you've been taught.
Anyway, all these paintings I'm putting up today have already been traded off or have already been promised to other tattooers. They took weeks of tireless work to do. The resin coating ensures that the owner will get at least a hundred years of work out of them. I added the glitter as a modern, eye catching sort of element as well. When you walk past them you can't help but want to look over and see whats up.My iphone pictures don't do them justice so my narration will have to do for now. It is awesome. Most of the designs are from older sources that I repainted and slightly updated. The eagle and skull is my own and the painting with the green glitter is of my own design as well. I plan on doing more of these resin coated flash sheets down the road but it is very expensive and time consuming and SUPER EASY to botch. I went through two other sheets and ruined them before I got to this point even. So preparing four at once was a nightmare. I don't think I even slept the night I let these guys cure.
I've had a few offers and some interest in my work recently and I was kind of flirting with the idea of selling my stuff, but honestly I only want tattooers to own originals of my stuff so I'm not in any hurry to start whoring my art out to the masses or anything...Not that it's a bad thing to desire money and the security it can bring necessarily, but I'll leave that to the more financially motivated of us in tattooing. For now trading art to fellow craftsman is more than adequate for me. And just going to work every day and tattooing provides all the security I need currently.
So Right now I'm enjoying the winter sluggish season and working on a split sheet of flash with Portland Oregon tattooer Justin lee which I will post in a week or so when its finished. Let me tell you folks, he is a bad ass tattooer and painter. And when he asked me if I wanted to split a painting with him I attacked it.
Until I put it up, here's a link to Justin's web page so you can see what I'm talking about.
adornbodyart.com/tattoo-portfolios/portland-artwork/art-by-justin/
Hope you dig what I've done so far this year. I have MANY more things planned for the months coming up.
Here's part of a poem by Bukowski that I think about sometimes at night when I'm painting...It's kind of sad, but in the end if you just keep pushing and pushing someone somewhere will pick up on it someday.
“and as my grey hands
drop a last desperate pen
in some cheap room
they will find me there
and never know
my name
my meaning
nor the treasure
of my escape.”
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