15 books that will change the way you tattoo (for the better)

owlbooksThere are a lot of great books on art out there, and I’m bound to miss a lot in my list. These are just books I have found incredibly helpful in my work, and which I refer to often.

These are not books of reference images (although I did come up in the time before google images took over, and every shop had its own reference library on site…I still can’t part with all those books!)

These are, instead, books about art in general, about art techniques, or about being an artist that I think apply very well to tattooing. If you have favorites that I do not list, please add a comment and link me to them! I read voraciously and love to find new sources of knowledge.

At least a few of these are free on kindle/ebooks, most are cheap, one or two are pricey, all are available and not rare.

 

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.
To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.
~J. M. Whistler

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more things I did in roseburg!

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Resonant Eye and violet mandorla piscis vescica for dear, sweet Katie.

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spidery.

These are all sold. I have some prints (also here, here, and here) of these available but not the originals….. And yes, these came from a nightmare. (Originally Published on: Oct 23, 2011)

He-AnjiMarth-taxidermyassemblagefdb1c104d062f1d219043b2b2d3511ca-d4ewkg1l_8eea1450-0e1b-11e3-9197-abc795700014spiderbones spider rat taxidermy articulation

 

 

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around the shop

I came in way early (for me) today, and I had a little time to spare, so I took some pictures of things from around the shop.

It’s funny how every shop has its walls of sketches- one of my favorite things to do is look at everyone’s rough drawings.

some of my prints at the shop (you can dig through them in person there if you're local)

some of my prints at the shop
(you can dig through them in person there if you’re local)

Pig skull tribal mount, hanging among its friends (she is also for sale)

Pig skull tribal mount, hanging among its friends
(she is also for sale)

Lisa's sketches

Lisa’s sketches hanging on her wall

How you can help me. and other medical nonsense!

If you follow my site or know me personally, you know I have been through some medical hell the past ten months or so.

TMI after the break.

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why does everything have those three lines and/or dots in it?

I always use three lines/three dots on anything I do. Sometimes they’re front and center, the focal point of the art, and Sometimes they’re obscured- hidden in the backdrop or repeated in a pattern so as to be less noticeable.

I began doing this because of the greek character Ξ, Xi. There’s a few layers of meaning there, and all of them combined made me interested in the symbol/shape, and that interest led to me using it as a part of my signature for a while. After that it migrated, getting further detached from my initials, and becoming more a part of the artwork. And from there it just sort of infiltrated every piece I make.

Back in the 80s-90s I was really interested in mindhacks and psychedelics and pTv and related art and music.

I did some work with sigils. I’m not a believer, not even agnostic, but I do know that our subconscious is a strong force, and that affecting it, changing it, tinkering in there, can bring some odd results. Working with visual symbols is one of my ongoing experiments- using an eye as the main focal point in a painting that is smaller and might be stolen from a gallery (even the most abstract eye affects the behavior of the people around it- see this study for details) or using hands, in various gestures, to suggest action to the viewer.

So while I have an abiding interest in all these things I am not any kind of believer. I do entertain the idea that Jung may have had a good point about how symbols and visual cues lead us, and have an impact on our lives, so it’s always been my effort to find ways to incorporate these things, at least subtly, into my work. The three lines/dots is a personal symbol, though, which I use in my art to influence MYSELF. So in the sense of it meaning something to the viewer, maybe- it’s done intentionally as a prompt to myself while working, though.

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Bus to CA, poetry from my book "Tar and Gravel"

29157_397937423370_2677846_nfrom tar and gravel

bus to CA

There’s something beautiful and comforting about grey vomit stains barely scrubbed from velveteen seat backs and

something about the dense air and useless frustrated wanderlust of the greyhound station and the greyhound itself, this universe of breakdowns

in Pierre North Dakota and Weed, CA that makes me calm. Patience. It makes my mind shut tight and arrange itself compulsively. checking

repeatedly for wallet, keys, ticket, the automatic functions of the reptile brain fully involved;

Making sure nothing is lost, nobody touches me, children don’t climb and I

in the meantime have killed the upper brain.

 

Feet automatically avoiding the sprawl of wild loud children with sticky fingers and dirty pink too-tight shirts where they sit on the floor at the entrance

to the terminal; thirteen slightly torn and stretched garbage bags full of towels, clothes, toys, no books but I can see the handle of

a cast-iron fry pan

clearly outlined in the plastic, spilling around the children is the detritus of people who don’t

 

realize that frying pans are available at thrift stores in duluth as well as southern california.

Bus to CA, poetry from my book “Tar and Gravel”

29157_397937423370_2677846_nfrom tar and gravel

bus to CA

There’s something beautiful and comforting about grey vomit stains barely scrubbed from velveteen seat backs and

something about the dense air and useless frustrated wanderlust of the greyhound station and the greyhound itself, this universe of breakdowns

in Pierre North Dakota and Weed, CA that makes me calm. Patience. It makes my mind shut tight and arrange itself compulsively. checking

repeatedly for wallet, keys, ticket, the automatic functions of the reptile brain fully involved;

Making sure nothing is lost, nobody touches me, children don’t climb and I

in the meantime have killed the upper brain.

 

Feet automatically avoiding the sprawl of wild loud children with sticky fingers and dirty pink too-tight shirts where they sit on the floor at the entrance

to the terminal; thirteen slightly torn and stretched garbage bags full of towels, clothes, toys, no books but I can see the handle of

a cast-iron fry pan

clearly outlined in the plastic, spilling around the children is the detritus of people who don’t

 

realize that frying pans are available at thrift stores in duluth as well as southern california.

Three things I miss about 1989.

tumblr_llv78nlRaH1qepg0fo1_500I miss watching Female Trouble a few times a week.


It was the first movie I had ever seen that completely acknowledged how I felt about life, that made perfect sense to me. It was reassuring in all the right ways and it influenced my speech, my life in fact. It made me feel all right about being a xenophile, and being unable to fit in. We were strange people and the world shit on us regularly- and somehow this movie made it all ok, because it meant there was a whole world of other strange people out there, and they all had been through it and survived. 

And yes, it came out in 1974- around when I was born(ish). But I saw it in 1989 and that for me is the era I associate it with, being that I was only a toddler when it was made.

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