SCARWARS

It’s been too long since we’ve put up anything by the lovely Christiane of Oslo; in order to fix that… a really well executed (and may I say “pretty”) floral cutting.

Christiane can be reached via: http://www.pinpoint-piercing.no/

Accolades are a weird thing. When I was considering creating an award in Keith Alexander’s honor for the second SW event, I threw out a bunch of names to the artists who I respect; asking them who they thought really changed the culture of scarification.

A similar list of names came up; each artists bringing up the people they were inspired by. It formed a pretty clear picture of the previous two decades of Scarring; Raelyn and Fakir, Steve Haworth and Blair… every list had a few of the same folks.. but only one name was on all of them.

Ron Garza.

I met Ronnie for the first time back in 1995 or so; virtually. He was already a character and laid claim to a burgeoning legend; some of which I’m sure he’d rather forget. But the constant back then was him sending me pictures of the cuttings he was doing. Very ‘ahead of it’s time’ stuff, Ron was using tattoo iconography as a basis for large scale cuttings. In 1995 the prevailing design aesthetic for cutting and branding was mainly ‘tribal’ or ethnographic, fraternity designs or geometrical stuff.

Ron took Chicano tattoo designs and laid them in with scalpel. Some of his early work really got my mind churning for what could be possible with scarification and along with Keith’s passion for it leeching into my brain, pretty much steered me on to the path that created the SW events.

With that in mind, we presented Ron with the first (and currently, only) ‘KEITH ALEXANDER AWARD FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF THE ART AND CULTURE OF SCARIFICATION’ in 2006.

He’s spent most of his life traveling, piercing, tattooing, cutting and suspending and continues to be a valued presence in my life.

Ron sent in a new cutting this morning; a shaded rose piece on a client from Ohio. The shading stuff looks so awesome when it’s healed. I’ll bug Ron to bug the client to keep us updated.

He’ll be guesting in Seattle March 8th – 14th and is taking appointments now: RonGarza.com for contact info.

In tattoo iconography, the rose is one of the most highly recognizable “old school” designs. To get it just right is deceptively hard. Too realistic, it looks gaudy. Too simple, and it looks like cabbage. It’s especially difficult to pull off a good rose design when you don’t have shading and color to give it definition.

If you’ve been keeping up with the scarwars blog lately though, you know that our man in the UK Lewis Dodd has a keen eye for scarification pieces featuring traditional tattoo imagery and is quickly becoming known for his bold line cutting. Add it all up and the client is going to end up with an amazing scar courtesy of Mr. Dodd.

Photo by Atom Moore.

I was just thinking to myself that the ol’ SW blog needs more Jesse V.
Shot by Atom Moore at the 2006 event, Jesse was working on a huge lotus cutting on my friend Jezebel. The finished piece can be seen after the jump.

Jesse is expanding his THRIVE STUDIOS; you can check the progress here.

Back in June we featured a henna cutting by John Joyce (which you can see here) . He promised updated photos, and since JJ never lies- here it is.

Upper half healed, fresh lower half.

Atom snapped this photo at SW2 in SoCal.
It’s one of my favorite photos from the events; focusing on the person wearing the branding/cutting brings out the personalities that make the Scarification community so amazing and usually makes for a much better image than an up close shot of cut/branded skin.

Cautery branding usually takes much less time than a comparable sized cutting with removal but still takes a lot out of the client. Michelle was a trooper and headed over to the photo studio immediately after being branded (electro-cautery by Monte Vogel) for this shoot and despite being in a significant amount of discomfort still ended up looking perfect.

Zoomed photo after the break.