Kari Barba has been tattooing for four decades. One of the few female tattooists in the field in the 1980s who has devoted to raising awareness on gender equality and pushing tattoo-hygiene standards to what we recognize today. She is tattoo royalty, owner of Outer Limits, the longest-running tattoo studio in America and the second […]
Category: Painting
We met up with tattoo artist Yanina Viland in her new private studio in Lisbon, Portugal, located in the traditional part of the city that overlooks the Tagus river. She smiled, showing us her balcony—the outdoor space where she spends time just chilling and collecting thoughts. Her dog BB King, a friendly mutt she adopted […]
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. […]
Shane Pierce is an artist from Missouri (currently based in North Carolina) who describes his life and art as “nomadic”—travelling, working in different creative fields, and populating his oil paintings with skull-faced suitcase-toting wanderers ( “‘a stranger comes to town’ type of theme,” as he describes it in a fascinating interview with Beautiful Bizarre). With […]
Tom Strom is an artist based in Edinburgh, Scotland, who paints and tattoos colorful “creature mash-ups.” Among his inspirations are anime and Disney movies—the former for monster design, the latter for colorful backgrounds. He began tattooing over twenty years ago, during which time he experimented with different techniques and developed his style, which is an […]
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 […]
Bill Mayer is a well-known artist currently based in Decatur, Georgia, whose curious creatures have been widely featured on magazines, ads, stamps, posters, and more. Since an early age, Mayer has been attracted to things that are strange; this leaning towards oddity is evident in the selection of gouache paintings shown here, which include anthropomorphic […]
“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 […]
Nunzio Paci is Bologna-based painter and illustrator known for his philosophic re-imaginings of anatomical studies. Themes of death, rebirth, and the undefinable boundaries of the body and spirit have followed him throughout his work. Whereas his older paintings (featured here) explored life as it bloomed from human cadavers, his newer works shift the focus to […]
Mathieu Laca is a Montreal-based artist creating “deliciously appalling” oil paintings that transgress the conventions of traditional portraiture. The majority of his recent work focuses on various historical figures throughout the realms of art, literature, philosophy, and science. Whether he’s painting the face of Vincent van Gogh, Franz Kafka, or Frida Kahlo, there are always […]
