ptenjoy | Don Ed Hardy's tattoos are high art and big business

Don Ed Hardy's tattoos are high art and big business

21 May, 2009

As a kid, Hardy sent away for tattoo supply catalogs advertised on the back of Popular Mechanics and was enchanted by Bert Grimm's gaudy tattoo parlor at Long Beach's Nu-Pike amusement park. He was also inspired by the tattoos he saw on men in wanted posters on post office walls. Hardy found his metier a ed hardy woman socks decade later at the Oakland tattoo shop of Phil Sparrow, a former Loyola English professor and friend of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Sparrow had bailed out of academia for the adventure and freedom of tattooing. He showed Hardy a book of full-body classical Japanese tattoos, and the young art student was never the same. "It was mind blowing,'' Hardy says. "It was so much more advanced than Western tattoos. These tattoos were fitted to the whole body, epic things with mythological subjects. I thought, 'If tattoos can look like this, it would be a challenging medium to work in.' "Phil was the first renegade intellectual I met. He loved the idea of being self-sufficient and the underground ed hardy woman shoes life and all that. He was a very interesting cat, an author who wrote all this gay porn that in those days was just published in Denmark. He was in the closet then.'' "The closet was pretty flimsy,'' Nagel adds with a laugh. Handy pestered Sparrow to teach him the trade. Sparrow had learned it from a tattooer named Amund Dietzel, a Danish sailor who'd been to Asia, worked in Chicago and set up shop in Milwaukee. "The oral history of tattoos is fantastic,'' says Hardy, who has published many books and magazines on the subject. "These old guys were like a bunch of pirates, and that's what attracted me to it.'' Hardy did some tattoos at Sparrow's place. In the tradition, he did the first on himself -- a Victorian rose with a woman's face, on his left ankle -- to know how it feels on both ends when ed hardy woman sunglasses the needle goes in. Conceptual and minimalist art were becoming the rage, and Hardy didn't go for either. He admired craft, which became a dirty word in the art world. "I love the fact that tattooing is a craft, that there is a working-class aesthetic to it. I came out of a blue-collar thing, and so did my wife. The craft aspect is what I also liked about etching: There's a right way and a wrong way to do it. 'Tattooing,'' he says, "gave me a way to be free. Otherwise I was going to be an academic.'' "God forbid,'' says Nagle, a self-described "academic by default.'' In 1974, Hardy, whose 40-year-old son, Douglas, tattoos in Minneapolis, returned to San Francisco from Japan to open the first tattoo place focusing on one-of-a-kind commissions, ed hardy woman waches a collaboration with the client. A surgeon got a giant squid whose tentacles curl around his shoulders, buns and legs. The tattoo stops above his elbows because the doc didn't want to jar colleagues when he rolled up his sleeves to scrub for surgery. Before Hardy came along, people usually wandered into a shop and pointed to one of the "flash'' drawings on the wall and within an hour or so would have it etched in their flesh. That's how Lyle Tuttle, the other famous San Francisco tattooer, worked (he retired a few years ago from the North Beach shop that bears his name). Hardy got back into painting and printmaking seriously in the mid-'80s after moving to Hawaii, where he also returned to the long-board surfing of his sunny youth. In 2000, the Year of the Dragon, he painted a marvelous 500-foot-long scroll featuring 2000 dragons of varying size, shape and character in a stylistically diverse work that summoned ed hardy woman wallets the 19th century Japanese master Hokusai and American action painter Franz Kline. "That freed me up,'' Hardy says, "because most of my art had been either etching or tattooing -- extremely tight, finicky kind of stuff. I was always interested in a freer kind of painting.'' He advises young artists to free themselves from "some careerist agenda, and do art that really means something to you personally.'' ed hardy hoodies outerwear
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The article is from http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/09/30/DDGGQLERS51.DTL&type=printable

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