Ed Hardy: the Godfather of Tattooing

[Music] what's he putting on you oh you're a cross the top of your back yeah yeah he tattooed you from way back I think yeah yeah you have that car right the really cool car yeah you know I quit tattoo and eight years ago i tattooed 40 years and people oh just do one more of it man how you know it's hard on your hands yeah they're okay I can still paint that I just want to tattoo anymore especially all these great brilliant young tattooers that work with it that's you know you pass it on so I'm gonna go these guys are sharing this thing all right good to see man okay John [Music] did that kind I hear about the same age we're talking about the way the city used to be you may only want to hang out with old farts and reminisce when we get for this taste and hearty is arguably the most important tattooer the 20th century has produced Ed's drawing is just raw you know it'll cross lines it'll lip shade he added another flavor with any put a new spark to the old images he hands-down created this public desire for a media that had been a fringe medium for centuries he can blur those lines between tattooing and buying art he's always doing that he always wanted to kind of make tattooing legitimate so to speak whatever you can think of that you might have wanted to do Ed's done it get it back he's done in Japan by hand 1973 ed went there published the first tattoo books and did that tattoo time had incredible artwork in it just showing what tattooing could be there was definitely a game changer and I think it influenced a lot of people in my generation well Artie realizes they very much importance to make sure it gets documented somehow and in print you know this is the real deal he integrated the historical styles of tattooing from all over the world into a big exciting monster he had so much roots in foundation and all the birth and application and he come up with stuff totally original that he wasn't copying or taking from anybody parties passionate about a lot of different things but one that he is not as well known for is his art the artist is totally my therapy and I've never been a shrink or anything broke just as well I've amassed this insane amount of stuff I've made and you just want to pass on something it's been good to you this was a log when I started my first shop my daily reminder of 1968 this was my budget the grand total was three thousand dollars equipment 325 advertising 750 the initial rant home and shop three hundred and seventy five dollars I was able to convince my first wife my father-in-law opening a tattoo shop was a business that could work you know this in those days yeah Thursday April 4th 2250 the first day man I'm often running I'll never forget so there was a dummy real thing but they had to pass under there was no body table set up and this guy came in I think he was junked out or something trying to attach his bird on his belly and he's doing this wound I thought oh gee this might be harder than I thought from when I was a little kid I was obsessed with tattooing just seemed like the coolest thing there was and at the point when I graduated art school I reconnected with it and thought yeah this has just got all kinds of potential I've tattooed for 40 years and retired from putting on tattoos about eight or ten years ago and back to my personal art yeah the show up like that [ __ ] you know it wasn't happy about that I know when I had decided to sign the contract to license out whatever number of designs he did way back when no one would ever dream this would happen and he had a great name NRT which sounds so American all sudden Busta Rhymes had an Ed Hardy shirt and hat and the Madonna was seen in it so blew up it financially afforded him a situation where he could focus on painting and that's been great for him I got really annoyed when people started putting down I had a hearty but all they knew him was as some designs on sneakers or t-shirts you know no there's a actual real thinking artist continuing to grow artists behind that brand name you know they had a hearty I had a lot of people give me a lot of [ __ ] about that more yeah what are you doing man putting stuff on these t-shirt how do you feel about that I said I feel pretty good I bought this building one of the things that's fascinating to me about Edie and his family his mom particularly is that she kept everything and that's become a family tradition he meticulously records everything and he's always got a journal on him he's always writing all this stuff down and he keeps a record of all this stuff and it's really incredible super conscious about my legacy and everything and I'm hold down I don't know how long you know I'll be around to kick this stuff over so I don't want to piece it out I wanted to go someplace this was just a big Eagle Road for me if I'm gonna just showcase all my art I just thought well it's been a really interesting life all this stuff happening and because I've saved it all you know it'd be nice to chronicle it art never seems to make me peaceful or pure I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity my first shop in Vancouver down an area in there Sailor Jerry this guy Hong Kong Kong that had the lead share at Burt Grimm's knew he'd worked with Jerry and I kept saying but I want to know more about journeying the law he's a trip he's a trip and one night we were hanging out with Tom were smoking weed and and we went over to his apartment and he broke open his footlocker you know the tattoo we always kept all our stuff in trunks and he came out with these color photos of Jerry's work which included like these cranes no one was doing tattoos like that it was the color the imagery the beauty of it the sort of mastery of the drawing and I just remember looking over that oh well so so this is why Sailor Jerry's like everybody talks about him anyway yeah he's a trip and then this jumps to when I was working in San Diego and I was I was really promoting the idea of doing big unique tattoos and we were probably clocking we might have been making maybe $20 an hour 25 Benjamin you know I was working for Doc Webb that's where I got my chops up tattooing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of servicemen down there [Music] this book that was the first real book about Japanese tattooing this book was the first revelation because it was all these classic Tokyo tattooers that were really doing stuff right out of the woodblock prints 19th century style first time I went in Phil sparrows he said oh you're an art student he said look at this this is real art this book just came out about Japanese tattoos and when I saw those pictures basically I thought well if they can do it I can do it and it was just like thunder in the room you know so incredibly powerful the key connection was Cosmo gory or a he day and gifu city gory came over from Japan and we all stayed at Jerry's house just over a three-day period and then when I saw this handwork firsthand it was just like 3,000 years on the head of a pin yeah we just we'd never seen anything like that was so it was cosmic and right away I thought getting a souvenir I said would you do my back and I was fixated on this one image from a Kuniyoshi print it was just amazing and he said I can come and work with him so that's it man and had a very strong focus on Japanese tattooing he helped introduce that style to the United States there's only been a few non Asian artists that have perfected the Japanese style to where they could take that stuff and make it their own did you bring it yeah you wanna get a shot of it yeah what the hell k one of my favorite pieces by ed hardy actually is at UM amore Orion he put in so many of these elements and but he just got such as angst in that face like I think definitely what the Japanese stuff like he took that simplicity the boldness like the toughness of American tattooing and he made it so raw that to me is just raw IDI power my Japanese art signature which was choreo enough so I was using when I was first when I went over to Japan and other things so I came back from Japan dead broke I saw a tune in San Diego and build up a little bankroll then I opened realistic in 1974 I was 29 when I opened that up people challenged me you know idea I would never would have had the interest or smartness to do this style of thing as a tattoo but by opening it up to people that wanted something very different it opened me up when he and my stepmother Francesca decided that yes we should move back to San Francisco and he was gonna open a custom only shop I knew it was really different it turned out that that was the first custom only tattoo shop in America period before the 70s when I started getting tattoos if you wanted to get a custom design there was like an iron you can't get that he was way ahead of the game with that private studio business when you walked into that place you know you felt like you're somewhere once people started realizing they could get their dream tattooed on you know a lot of people were doing it now not because they thought it was cool because they just plain wanted it he created a situation where everybody had to step up their game and step up to this idea of custom tattooing it changed everything all sudden it was seeing him doing these sometimes small sometimes really big just elaborate pieces that no one had ever seen before I mean I said it was like going to Denny's or something what's for dinner six things is I thought this is stupid you're gonna wear it forever you got to pick up the wall I mean I love the old flesh but my whole mission with this is if I can just open it up and let people encourage them to come in and tell me their ideas it'll change this thing right now my favorite metaphor is a police sketch artist you describe the person that broke into your house and the guy looked like this and he did this and that's how I would try to pull the imagery out of people that I was supposed to draw and I loved it when people go that's exactly how I imagined bitchin what's okay good we'll do that you know I knew that San Francisco would be the place that I could make it work because there was enough alternative consciousness this city is famous rightfully so for people doing things a bit differently San Francisco has been a magnet for rebels a long time I think you come here and you just feel like you can do anything [Music] that's my view no my first publicity small town they published a newspaper once a week and all these kids started walking around with these really good-looking tattoos at my buddy Lenny and I were doing with colored pencils that you can you could put into water and then it turned them into water color and then Lenny's mom suggested Maybelline eyeliner for the outline because the black would stay on there and then we just kind of segwayed into it like let's do tattoos on neighborhood kids and we set up a little toy shop in my house and those are our licenses as it was fifth grade pictures Lenny's dad had a bunch of tattoos from World War two he was in the Navy at ten years old I just thought that's really far out [Music] this is one of the first ones ideas for tattoos that Lynn and I did we probably each drew one side of it we try to get kids to come over just so we get to do tattoos you know and we'd have prices on him like 6 cents and I drew these tiny because we were all little but we didn't care we just want to be able to do the tattoo so this is probably for 55 yeah the start it was 55 so I was 10 and a half and a lot of these were copied you know from Burt Grimm's when I got revved up about tattoo immediately I I started visiting Birds I don't know how many times I actually went out there you had to save up money and you don't get on the Greyhound and then go up and it was amazing here's 10 11 years old and our parents let us get away with I mean those times were so innocent so all these shapes kind of ricocheted back and forth in my life it's a Rock of Ages I love it having all this work on paper and keeping it you know a lifetime of fun [Music] as my room which was painted black ultra hipster modernist painting I lost all the series of art that I did at that period somehow I remember I got I tore up an enormous amount of work on paper one day I was drunk and my mother was pleading with me should please let me keep it and I was like no this is my student work you know mister like so conscious right I tried to well I couldn't really everyday I started drinking when I was maybe 13 you know it just took to it like a fish to water I mean it's totally alcoholic from them I knew I thought this isn't right but every weekend we just get throw-up drunk you know cetera it was a alcoholic culture you know his Beach kids and a lot of people lunatics you know rich kids living hey there's a party at so-and-so's you just go over and trash this house and they break in you know break the lock off the parents liquor cabinet you know it's totally decadent I didn't quit drinkin til 1982 when I was 37 my wife Francesca finally just said well you know I can't take this anymore and and I realized she'd met and I tried to quit before that and well that's it and I just got on the phone and dialed AAA and it's like so that but I was still smoking partners you know snorting coke and crank once in a while Victor I finally had to give up everything you know I hate I had my fun self-portrait with Goya he was in love with Goya and surf's when you're a teenager and I got really hot on classical or you know eccentric classical art from art history I just got obsessed with wanting to know where it all came from I started rambling around and reading and tracking down where I could and of course it was hard to find art books especially down where I was there was no real culture you know Gervin is totally fascist right-wing you know Orange County everybody there was I completely you know crazy conservative we all knew we just had to get out somehow luckily I encountered a woman that was about the high school art teacher she was a Jewish intellectual from New York with a broad range of experience totally unlike most of these you know people that were living in the area I grew up in and then this woman kept saying you could really do something with your art this was a collage that I did when I was 17 when I got serious about making art being an artist my mother would say things that she realized the importance of like keeping all this stuff so it was I was glad I saved this one and I used all this material from when I was obsessed with tattooing as a kid it's supposed to be the life of a tattooer say starts out with like little kids and at the bottom is this old-time tattooer and he's like cutting stencils sitting on the Midway I thought well yeah that's really funny when I was a little kid I was gonna be a tattooer but now I'm trying to be an artist you know it was just like fixated on high art and I didn't you know dislike tattooing but I just thought well that's a phase I'm going through that you know not knowing it would come back and snare me in a couple of years no your haunts here on Russian Hill Don it's really zone the old zone the old home zone yeah from way back this place has been around since the 1920s and there's been this fixture in San Francisco as this sort of you know counter art anchor in many respects that beatnik era stuff had kind of funk stuff of the 1950's came out of here which segue right into the early 60s when ed hardy came to school here from Southern Californian followed a couple of his friends up here a lot of people from the West Coast and from California always would gravitate to this place it was legendary because the really important artists that had taught here became super important American artists in mid 20th century Mark Rothko had been here and these great avant-garde filmmakers were here general feeling here was that people were just doing it because they couldn't not do it they were compelled to I'm gonna make this art that looks like this and find like-minded people and no kind of career ISM or all the [ __ ] that runs the art world today on a global level which is also I think tattooing has become incredibly important and it offers people a way to make their art or people to collect their art and to connect on some really primal kind of human levels that don't have anything to do with commodification I love the fact that people say oh well your art won't be in the museum's I don't know man it's all gonna be dead but that's okay you know so but then now we're making stuff that on things that might last this is where you want as a stood yeah that's a cure I met one of the people that were from Vancouver that led me to move on up to Canada you know I got to meet these people from BC and I was just starting to tattoo then so I didn't know that yeah and then Friday you're going to the Legion Friday morning we're going to the Aachen but that's gonna be fun yeah hi We're the printmaking there's a conceptual aspect but basically it's work get this and there's a right way in a wrong way and you make those things happen I think that's what attracted me to it well it has that same thing that ceramics does yes wood tattooing probably works you know you know frowned upon is not being an art yeah it's so technical driven yes that people forget wait a minute yeah no this is the real deal it's a real deal yeah it's something that's measurable you know great drying rash yeah there was a whole thing too about the macho aspect of like the sculptors and then the painters they were always like really dirty you really knew they were a sculptor it was corny like oh that guy's a painter because he's left all this paint on his pants you know and I mean something and some are doing good work with a lot of it there's just so much leeway for attitude abuse I mean it's like when I told that story is Gordon cook stay away from artists I mean is self-conscious about all I am an artist you know give me a break you know do something real it's a nice clear day too yeah it's gorgeous did you ever surf when you came up here I surfed here for like about a summer it was so cold he's decided to move to Hawaii you know that's right for any guys that's right you know I know all those [ __ ] down there from Orange County the first department was that one right over across there and then my wife and I had an apartment in a building out back here for a number of years I've always been just magnetized to North Beach you know one story I liked about when Richard Shaw when he was first teaching here he had you come into his class yes that's right and give a talk and he said you should bring your machines and put on some tattoos all right you know cuz I've been tattooing in San Diego then and so this is just pre Japan so it was whatever you that was 73 something like that but then I got my gear out and I tattooed Sean I was the first popbar tattoos I did he got a cup of coffee on him and and people just didn't do stuff like that thing I'll tell you if you if you ever want to come back and do that same thing that you didn't show us class the students would really prohibit are you give a talk and bring your kit with you I know I don't you're somebody who's almost had their archivist mentality which you know some people think is hoarding but it's not really it's not really it's open that together it's like we're keeping the umbilical yeah yeah that's perfect yeah [Music] when I came up here to San Francisco I wanted to do really dramatic things and I was gonna be a lethargy fur because I liked all this dark stormy stuff and nuances of washes but I connect with this guy Gordon Cooke who was a chore didn't turn me out of the nuances of like the interior life of what happens when you're just doing very very everyday kind of things the relationship between you know Ed Hardy and Gordon Cooke you know I don't think it was like a relationship like a master printer and his student I think a lot of it was you know how to exist in the art world and how to sort of Shepherd somebody through to encourage them to continue to make work and be an artist and he was eager to learn so this is city of San Francisco and it was done on site from Twin Peaks [Music] myself and Martha Paul we were kind of the lead edging students and this guy cook wanted to give us something that really bust our buds she had a car and we go up there and sit with a wind blowing and the tour bus is coming up and going oh look at artists looking over our shoulders I mean it's like tattooing also right there's no go backs you know you just do it and then you etch it and that's it this was a key image to that unfortunate I didn't save this plate but I called it future plans so this is 1967 it was when I graduated art school and I was on a career track I was accepted to Yale and I was gonna figure I get a job teaching art that's all of us figured we could do you know and allow us to keep making our own earth and I showed this off at the final student show to tell everybody because I was kind of a student with promised I was going to go on and then I said well I'm gonna be a tattoo of a nose and nobody had ever heard of that [Music] this one is the one I got from Negrete me Vitas on sueño and then when was my 50th birthday and I got there whom he ducks so it's a little dialog thing my life is a dream and then he goes who me and then when I was in Spain I got this home sign up there I thought that was good like it was like a little question mark but it C home sign you who did the dragon sooner Jerry and this covered a bunch of those early tip I kind of regret covering up all the early stuff but you know you can't cry over spilt milk it was early on that was my first wife's name which I had to disappear and then Douglas cuz he kid my elbows then they hurt so much I never got him color you know yeah well gory did the rosary I did the waves when we got back from Japan Francesca stretch the skin and I drew those on but the bird gremlin really meant a lot to me we did it I didn't laying on a bed in a hotel room in San Francisco since 1981 Bob Roberts total la bad boy tattoo I just I had the space and we were visiting Bob and I went oh man I need a tattoo from you you know you only catch you Ferb I know what else did he do on me shoot Malone framed out my back over worried did the main thing I think I've got something else from Bob but um can't remember what it was yeah yeah my memories are roading as we speak so all this stuff is I can't bring most of it back [Music] I've known it had a hearty since the Punk days in San Francisco he didn't meet everybody and story it was such a small thing I did research magazine modern prevalence was the most popular book I've ever produced over a period of years at least it's sold more than any other book I've done and then wanted to do a real early tattoo magazine and I said we'll all do the typesetting it's right here it's called tattoo time I did this book on Ed Hardy because I wanted people to know that he's much more than a tattoo artist that he's a real artist when I met Ed I went over to his house and I said ah fellow book collector I have 10,000 books in this house and he bribed us to he's like the first person I met who was so scholarly about it I appreciate being able to look up stuff online you know but the physicality of having a book and it's just like you see these things and there's something you can really cling [Music] that's a Matthew marks right can I look at it sure I'll open it books are the only inanimate things really in the world that matter to me and arts not inanimate it's good you know those are all transmitters in there it's time to connect with people that I'm on the same wavelength that we have tremendous you know interests and history and things you know keeping all that alive all my teachers all the painters have admired Gustin was the mainland because I got big on him really you know sixth late 60s early 70s all these forms and stories are embedded in me they're like old songs you know or something well I don't have this book gosh come on it's for sale right you sure you don't have this I might have it well you can always return it you know that yeah the nice thing about losing my memories it's all new it's like oh look at this book [Music] you need to collect the rent winter beaks [Laughter] tattoo city wouldn't be a lot of great people have worked through there and now we've got tons of guests artists now with this whole fluidity of movement among quatorze globally is fantastic you know it's really cool it's going good yeah the 90s really made San Francisco not just a tattoo destination known among the other tattooists like oh yeah that's the place to go it became place like the public was becoming aware like yeah if you want a great great work let's go to San Francisco let's go to Ted you see in the 90s San Francisco and the Bay Area was the epicenter of modern Western tattooing and that's because you know the 70s ad set up camp here oh yeah oh yeah my god yeah unbelievable man congratulations this was the only place I wanted to visit when I came to save it to scale the first time it was the best place in the world to try and be a tattooer and one day my phone rang and it was down on the floor trapped down from under me you know you don't expect that kind of coal to ever come my idea for the shop was I was like classic shops that are set up very like what I've walked into when I was 10 years old you know the small stations and a lot of history on the walls that's a doctor Locker apiece so that's Owen Jensen it's one of my I had Talbot sheets from my first shop a Long Beach tattooer told me that when he found out I was crazy about Sailor Jerry and he said that's one of Jerry's but it's not really it is Joe Lieber and I have maybe hundreds of pages of tracing paper line work of pinups and all that and it's almost impossible to tell their styles apart because they traded all this stuff this is my original inspiration for the screaming gorilla and that was from Burt Graham this is where I used to tattoo this is my station with Ocampo painting up there these are my teachers Sailor Jerry this is mr. Curran uma Lauri oh she's a second in Tokyo it kicks your ass ban tattooing is really hard on it's hard on you emotionally mentally physically every way Paul Rogers used to say you got to pile up your coins you got to plan to take care of yourself in case you're fortunate enough to get old it just figured okay you can graduate now you know more the Danny Donnie Moore thing so in my original flesh they had Talbot stuff this is from San Diego these were all Sailor Jerry designs that I repainted a piece up in the corners at homage that I painted at Jerry when I came back from Japan because he died while I was in Japan so I painted up that memorial you know Rock of Ages at the bottom of the sea when the American flag this was a sheet that was in the window of Fred Thornton shop that I was obsessed with when I was a little kid for a Grimm from the 50s for sure these were earlier things of mine from 1968 Ed Talbot stuff from Vancouver it was kind of the history of everything that was interesting to me you know about tattooing Doug I'll check in with you later then and yeah mark and I are gonna head out and then we'll see what happens and then Sunday we got that lunch at there Yeah right thank you okay kitchen yeah yeah I'll see you oh this is really early yeah this is a first album yeah 74 to 77 yeah these were all really early from from realistic days I mean of course I could tell boring stories about most of the people that are in there emember a lot of the people were friends and it was important to keep these you know photo albums and stuff so when people could come in and just see what was possible you know instead of having Flash on the wall so these books go back all the way and this was this guy's a physician down in Texas and he would come in and he said well I want to do my whole body suit with scenes from his magneri and opera that's Bob Roberts I worked with edit realistic tattoo 1976 77 78 I was there everything was custom there he could take these ideas and and he could make it work that he drawing you know he just had a real natural talent for that and it just used to amaze me man I mean I thank my lucky stars that I got to work under him there's a baked potato I love that thing but it drove me nuts cuz she came in I start out the first thing is like she lets out an ear piercing scream and I'm like whoa I said I can't tattoo you like this so she buried her face in the pillow and it's like so that wasn't the most relaxing tattoo I'd ever put on and I went right through it very quickly people brought me these concepts that I never would have approached on my own and was a challenge you know and took on a lot of things that I know could have been done better by somebody else but it's it's about what it is you just say well they want this and I'll do it the best I can for them this guy was really interesting he was obsessed with having his tattoos like show and like tease people he'd put this makeup on his hands and he kept going further and further out wanting to have his tattoos show and have somebody pick you know this was his fetish and then I found this stuff that would black like pigment and I think eventually he vanished I know I don't know when he died but all sudden at some point nobody saw him anymore this is all japan all japan rockabilly boys great haircuts that's yeah that's me tattooing in Tokyo this guy wanted bullet holes three steps to heaven because to them pop American culture was their exotica the way the Japanese was to mine you know so it was really interesting to get reconnected with stuff that was sort of my heritage [Music] we always said the old saying the old days you didn't want to be the only tattoo shop in town because you wanted to have somebody else that'd be your trashcan you know some guy down the street and you could troublemaking people come in and go I'd love to do that but I got it my machine isn't clean yet you have to go send them down the street you know some guy with an attitude coming in or some slob that just isn't you know everybody's got an attitude of swords tattoos came early but I really know it's drawing and encouraged draw since I was three you know this is actually from a shot from the dragon scroll that's a that's a part of the painting on the scroll I kind of pay attention to the Asian Saudi acting just as a hobby there's an animal for each year I thought the Millenial here is gonna be a dragon here ok I'm gonna do two thousand dragons and in a continuous piece friend of mine built like a roll through easel thing and you started it on New Year's Day 2000 [Music] the dragon scroll was a huge breakthrough for him when he started doing that he started with like tight big dragons but then he started just getting big and loose with a lot of things some of them were super abstract like just big splash the colors I thought okay this is my chance to free up I'd always wanted to be more of a free painter and that gave me the opportunity and I was just getting like throwing some paint and like okay well that's a dragon there I think he's just yielding to his subconscious Wow you know this came out it wasn't really me doing it I'm channeling it the freedom to be abstract when you're tattooing you're working on this very tightly render thing all the time but it's interesting because in the abstract work that he does he's able to maintain the kernels of these icons that he's used over and over again [Music] this shape was just a shape that I started using and I do the black right just like a tattoo and get it ahead and really fast and then realize where to build it from there so on this one I build it into an American Indian thing you know so put the beads on the moccasins and just whatever occurred to me the feathers that kind of stuff I just like to isolate some of these elements and try to convey them the weird energy that they have for me you know and then this thing a late Kuniyoshi thing of a wizard from part of the suit code n series and this was a drawing for a guys stomach piece in the early 1970s was a key image for me and did this I thought well I'll turn him sideways you know so this is basically that image you see the hands locked I mean it's not like the tattoo like yeah you start to tattoo and then you get in it and you do it and it's done but with the paintings you know the paper doesn't care but it's working out better for me to slow down and take my time on some of these and really think what's gonna make that finish out because nobody's got a gun to my head about about doing it it doesn't have to make sense I don't want it to make sense you know and I don't want it to be an identifiable story I wanted to just function as well what's that and well it's a painting that's that's it I don't do them to like save the world or anything I just want to make this stuff anyway the printmaking I got into printmaking in Chicago revived it after being away from it for years and these were actually done in Japan with Paul Milani his his master printer he turned me on to a lot of etching techniques that you could do more like brushwork and I just made him up as I went this one I've always loved the gorilla thing you know this is from bud shark this is lithograph I still think it looks awkward it's not if someone's not right about it but there it is this is a painting that I'd done that I really like and actually regretted selling because it was kind of a breakthrough of making a figure up out of traditional Americana tattoo that was my idea of making up things of opponents to just get the form that you would need for a forearm or whatever and then this was based on very much Burt Grimm style swallows that Burt would do is frame outs on a lot of his back pieces all these things were drawn in one shot I'm just went oh okay I'll do this there were no prep drawings it was just out of my head they're all responses to whatever is in front of my face I guess when I'm you know creating the plate I'm conscious of my age and what I've done with my life and then of course I've amassed this insane amount of stuff I've made you don't do this as a selfish thing you want to see it passed down you want to see other people exposed to it it's not the Famer in it's just to pass along but my teachers passed along to me so recently I got the idea to call this talking about foundation that prints and drawings at the Legion of Honor Museum where I studied a bit when I was in art school and they loved the idea and so we're kind of giving though essentially one impression of every print that that I ever made and it'll be great for me to have that legacy of have it in a place where people can see it it's the biggest thing that's happened to me in a long time the fact that the Aachen bak is interested makes a whole lot of sense with Hardy's work and shows you the caliber of his printmaking as well I'm really glad that some of his work will be preserved in that way because he is a very historically significant person on this art this is wonderful testing these things I published last year this was the question it's based on yeah the rotation breaking the temple and all the drawings that he did and the flash art they did I hope that people pay attention to it too and not just you know his quote unquote fine art because he probably would be bristle at that term because art is art to him knowing now that he's working with some people to get some of his artwork and some of his prints into like museums and stuff like that I think is incredibly important you know I'm all for private ownership and I'm also thrilled that I get to go to museums and see stuff or call up things that you know study senators Gordon Cook was a master of the medium and just really bold all the silver and all this architecting the different textures like I mean how I'm really kind of is able to grasp the different like waves and and stone and be an Ed Hardy this is obviously on the other deeply rooted in his own lesson iconography that be a lot so accustomed to I've actually done spin-off tattoos of that figure you know but maybe put them in a different job context of course at Goa and Rembrandt were two of my primary my inspirations that have referenced a lot of this deep so you know legitimate art history via my own paintings that are just kind of its kind of like a shout out to these people that they did this and I want to try to you know yeah transmit some of that energy so we're just all transmitters you know as far as me and my art and the transmission of whatever you've been able to find out yourself it just makes it better I'm not big on the idea of like original things or you know great ego or like I started all this you know nobody started anything it's just you know it just keeps going we are absolutely excited about this it opens up so many opportunist and we need to do some some great things with that nobody traffic and it's good to have it light up other people and Bobby young people come in oh my god you need to get the Prince here and then get started yeah exactly my father stork should be known as should be known by people who are interested in this beautiful weird art and crafts that were involved with and I'm just glad that it will be that [Music] good boy I think it's really cool to see that childlike joy in a man who's had a career is illustrious is his he is a collector he is an archivist of that you know tattoo history he's a walking Smithsonian when it comes to that him and his compatriots everything pivoted around what they did nobody is single-handedly done more for the promotion of tattooing worldwide every artist wants to do something original and advance their art and their craft and endows knows that and he he he did it he the leader this drawing I found that my mom saved I think that was maybe three or four when I did this my masterpiece was done by Donald he said is one of his best masterpieces retirement doesn't mean sitting around you know I'm watching wrestling retirement means more time to do my own art I'm excited about everything I'm proud about everything that maybe I had a little hand into bringing things along for people to develop what their personal you know like one of my cards where are your dreams you know that's the thing that's what you want to do there's nothing more important than creating as much art as you possibly can before you croak I think that's the meaning of life [Music] you you

Channel: VICE Asia

Views: 1,609,205

Rating: 4.9397922 out of 5

Keywords: japanese, art, Tattoo, history, Ink, skin art, Ed Hardy, journalism, videos, culture, interview, underground, vice videos, vice guide, exclusive, vice.com, world, docs, vice asia, viceland, vice, vice tv, tv, television, tv channel, vice magazine, ellen page, eddie huang, action bronson, ancient aliens, balls deep, hamilton morris, ed hardy, tattoo age, tattoos, subculture, clothing, fashion, jersey shore, douchebag, sailor jerry, sailor tattoos, traditional tattoos, old school, new, episode, full

Id: Tm9GjI02CNo

Length: 44min 5sec (2645 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/MyDude_reddit]

I hoped this was satire.. god father of tattooing.. as McDonald’s is The Godfather of burgers I suppose..

[u/DouchebagMcfucktard]

The father of terrible T shirts