Even though 2022 was the official “Year of the Tiger,” Seventh Son Tattoo believed it would be a fitting homage to begin 2023 with a traditional motif as the theme for their art exhibition. From Pinky Yun to Ed Hardy, the tiger has been consistently and strongly represented in the tattoo industry. Luke Stewart, tattooist […]
Category: Mixed Media
Freddy Corbin, Oakland’s Tattoo God
Freddy Corbin was born in Tampa, Florida, in 1966, grew up in Sacramento, and at 18, went to San Francisco, California, to pursue a career as a tattoo artist. Joshua Golden gives him his first professional tattoo at Lyle Tuttle’s shop. Corbin spent a lot of time at studios and received body art from various […]
From Berlin with Love: Tattoo Flash by Brian Kelly
Prolific tattooists Ben Corday and Sailor Jerry have continued to inspire new generations—think: sailing ships, pin-up girls, skulls and hearts—all of those symbols defined the “American Old-School Tattoos.” The same icons that US-native Brian Kelly has revived on skins and in tattoo flash. “Sometimes I use liquid acrylic for the white parts of the paintings. […]
Haunted by Animals: Cryptic Visions by Jenna Barton
Twilight fields and haunted pool sheds set the stage for illustrator/designer Jenna Barton’s cryptic visions. Combining watercolor with digital processing, Barton populates her mysterious world with unusual anthropomorphic beasts—a horned saint, a smoke bear, and a shadow dog that revisits the viewer like an unsettling dream. With minimalist yet symbol-filled compositions, Barton invites the viewer […]
Darkness and Innocence in the Illustrations of Yuriko Shirou
Yuriko Shirou is a self-taught illustrator based in Mexico. He has worked in many different art styles—including manga, American comics, and figurative art—and has done projects for publishers around the world. His illustrations resemble morbid fairy tales, conflating innocence with darkness. The moth is a recurring symbol, channeling Mesoamerican beliefs surrounding death omens and the […]
Seungyea Park: Monsters are Everywhere
The art of Seungyea Park (aka, Spunky Zoe) is a meeting with “monstrousness”—that is, the product of our fear as it festers among us. Fear is necessary to social systems because it distinguishes the self from a monstrous Other—the enemy, the freak. “Monsters are everywhere,” Park writes, because we compulsively create them. To help herself […]
Visceral Enigmas in the Art Work of Allison Sommers
“Pink viscera, heroic dogs, war detritus, barnacled crabs, and embedded nothings” are among the many curious images, both literal and metaphoric, that the Brooklyn-based art worker Allison Sommers uses to describe her creations. Across her portfolio, animals and human appendages unfurl and splatter into gleeful-grotesque jumbles of rot and metamorphosis, defying the confines of prescribed […]
Dissolving Boundaries: The Bio-Matter Art of Heather Komus
Heather Komus is a Winnipeg-based artist working with embroidery, found objects, plant matter, and animal matter (such as intestines, feathers, and hair) to explore the body as a permeable ecosystem. Fascinated by infestation and infection—the way microbes and spores penetrate the skin and colonize organs—her creations are like maps to a subdivided and multiplied body, […]
Passion and Escapism in the Sculptures of Jessica Dalva
Jessica Dalva is a multidisciplinary artist, exercising her talent and imagination in the mediums of sculpture, illustration, set design, puppet-making, and more. Previously based in LA, she now resides in San Francisco, where she helps maintain the wax figures at Madame Tussauds. In her beautiful wall-hanging sculptures, Dalva demonstrates her diverse abilities in art-making and […]
Gothic, Romantic Hand-Painted Photographs by Katie Eleanor
Katie Eleanor is a storyteller and photographic artist based in London. Inspired by literature, costume art, performance, and Victorian illustration, her work is dreamy, poetic, and filled with indescribable emotion. She hand-paints each photograph. Wearing powdered wigs, white makeup, and gauzy veils, the figures resemble nineteenth-century monarchs suspended in private states of reverie and despair; […]