Ed Hardy's High Art Tattoos and your business

Ed Hardy's High Art Tattoos and your business
By: Ed Hardy Clothing

40 years back, Don Ed Hardy blew a Yale art scholarship to pursue the art of tattooing rogue, an eternal and regular convention taboo that captivated him as a boy in the Orange County beach town of Corona del Mar. In ten years, he was drawing cars and eagles on the backs of kids and arms with pencil color and wet eyeliner Maybelline.
The San Francisco Art Institute in the early '60s, Hardy has mastered the demanding art of carving engraving under the tutelage of the late Gordon Cook a boy not jive-blue-collar Hardy who instilled a love of the craft, Asian art and silent power of images rather Giorgio Morandi still life. Cook was not happy when her protected gifted jumped into the murky waters of social tattoo. But it worked well for the brave Hardy Boy, that blurred the boundary between'high suposto''''and'low art and carved a path through the worlds of art and commerce. He drew pictures of torsos, giant screens and scrolls with equal conviction and coolness.

A pioneer and tattoo historian who expanded the palette and the pictorial possibilities of body art custom-made, Hardy, who will speak about his work in a major lecture slide-show Free at Mills College on Wed, is also a fertile lithographer, painter and engraver. Your photos of blazing demons, dragons, women with mustaches and Buddhas – Informed by old master etchings, woodcuts and 12''pergaminhos japanese'hell century 19th century engravings, Southern California hot rod striping and funk and mood of Bay Area art – are widely exhibited and collected. And for the past year or so, your photos tattoo soon, the'retro''crânios, girls and a sailor hat coconut dragons, in style, were in T-shirts, jackets, motorbikes and even energy drinks sold worldwide under the brand Ed Hardy.

There are now Ed Hardy stores in New York, Los Angeles, Tucson and Dubai. That 20 million dollars a year business, of which Hardy gets a small slice for the licensing of his name and art is the effort of French-born marketing ace Christian Audigier, who pushed the Von Dutch brand and now has all of Madonna to Larry King wrapped in Hardy. It's a nice turn of events for an artist who made his bones tattoo daggered hearts and anchors sailors in San Diego in the raffish days old before the body art has become respectable. Now it seems that there is practically a Starbucks and a tattoo parlor on every corner.

"Why do people do Tattoos? I'm not sure. I believe it is a completely primal desire,''says Hardy, 61. He is lost in the range of those he had put in his body since he got his first tattoo, a rose on his left shoulder in four Frisco Bob's in Oakland decades gone. "It's one of those mysterious things. Fully evidence-based, frozen mummies, the older members of our species had tattoos. I think prior paintings.''

An obsessive picturemaker since three years old, Hardy now divides her time between San Francisco, where his Tattoo City shop in North Beach is going strong, and Honolulu, where he paints and makes prints. He also spends time in Japan, where their photos are being hand-painted porcelain factory's production and paper goods and where it will create a giant dragon – the legendary king of Asia creatures – the roof of an ancient Buddhist Church in Kyoto.

"I have all this going on ',''announces Hardy, a modest man, direct and fun, which in 1973 became the first Westerner to study with tattooer a traditional Japanese master, the Horihide unusual in Gifu city, where Hardy punched and painted the skin of a number of Japanese gangsters known as yakuza. Dressed in a green checked shirt, khaki pants and a pair of sneakers laceless mint-green carrying the signature of Ed Hardy and his opinion on 1940 Tex Avery wolf slobbering, Hardy recalled his colorful history in town yesterday for Tattoo.

He helped transform the medium, creating elaborately designed and colored custom tattoos that often took weeks. He inspired young tattooers from Australia to Europe, many of whom came to San Francisco for a Hardy in their skin.

"It freed me up,''Hardy says," because most of my art had been any attack or tattooing – extremely tight, kind of weird things. I've always been curious about a type of paint free.''He advises young artists to free themselves careerist agenda from'some, not art that actually means something to you personally.''

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Body Art 6/7

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