I have been tattooing professionally for six years after serving an extensive apprenticeship with Spider Webb. I am a painter as well as a tattoo artist, and I hold a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. I feel that tattoo art is generally a commercial application. I find myself living in two worlds either creating images of my own visions, or pictures following models for the approval of the mass market. This is a hard practice to break due to the fact that a tattoo design is created for the wearer’s approval. I have been creating work that unifies and incorporates my own visions with an expression that creates the feeling of tattoo.
My drawings and paintings are representational of figurative characters as well as images that are used in tattoo work. These motifs tend to be elemental and organic such as lightning, fire, plants, etc. I use these symbols as a kind of visual language that can be understood by a broad spectrum of people. I choose to work in a fine art context. The images can be abstract and in that way make sense in a loose interpretation. I strive to keep an ironic balance of horror and the grotesque with humor and the pathetic. These images tend to be surreal. I work to create a feeling of motion in my work using a sense of narrative, storyboard and the cinematic. I think that this can be an interesting factor to be combined with the tattoo.