SCARWARS

The Philadelphia Tattoo Arts Convention is coming up again; March 26th-28th 2010. John J. Joyce is considering attending/cutting again this year so I’m spreading the word: If you’d like to be cut by John in Philadelphia you can contact him through the Scarab Website. Every person who gets cut by John at the convention will get a drawing of a monkey by either my girlfriend or my nephew as a present.

This reminder comes with another Gogo appearance; again from SW3 in Philly back in 2007, Photographed by Casey Goldsmith.

I have lots to say when it comes to John Joyce; that he can control the weather by touching his beard, that he knows when you’ve been bad or good (so be good, for goodness sakes) or more truthfully that he’s one of the best scarification artists in the world. Most importantly though, I can say that John is my friend. And that’s pretty goddamned awesome.

Happy birthday JJJ.

When I was preparing the second SW in late 2005 I received a letter in the mail from a young lady who was confirming her invite for the West Coast event. Most people took care of that online, but Sam went oldschool with actual mail and, in a move that I still find adorable, included a photocopy of her driver’s license so I’d be able to recognize her at the event.

I was fortunate enough to have booked my friend Rachel (owner of BME and all around renaissance woman*) as the portrait photographer for that event; while the photo on Sam’s driver’s license was good, the pictures Rachel captured of her are, I think, much more flattering. (I think I still have that photocopy somewhere)

(PS: you can see more of Sam here, here, here and here. Her lotus cutting was done by John Joyce and Brian Decker.

*Rachel would like it mention that, despite my claim of her being a renaissance woman, she will not be eating any turkey legs at the Renn Faire.

John started this piece at Xanadont (my humble South Philadelphia estate) with the koi and added the cherry blossoms at SW3. The piece features cross-hatch shading and was photographed by Atom Moore.

Tattoo iconography is fairly common in scarification design choices, but scarification is not tattooing. (obviously)
I’ve seen a lot of posts recently on tattoo blogs/message boards referencing the scarwars.net site, saying that they don’t like tattooing being associated with scarification. I’m sure it further confuses things when the designs are based in tattoo art. I guess we should be flattered; I remember when the tattoo community wanted nothing to do with body piercing; piercers being threatened at Dave Yurkew’s Texas tattoo convention in the late seventies, tattoo magazines distancing themselves from piercing/modification content. It’s come full circle (Steve Haworth did Enigma’s first generation horns at the 20th anniversary of Dave’s convention back in 1995, on the convention floor; Tattoo Savage has been in print for almost two decades) so I guess it’s expected that scarification, sharing the same graphic nature of tattooing, is an easy target for people who feel that what they do is ok but what we do is “gross mutilation” (they seemed to be particularly humored by someone saying that they wished they could scar like Sam) so… yeah. That’s that.

It will be a slow process to get scarification accepted in the body art community… but we’re doing what we can.

This piece was done at Scar Wars 3 in Philadelphia in 2007, which means in this photo it is almost 2 years old. Sam scars so much more dramatically than the average person, which is part of the reason that I love working on her. I have some pics of her other side which will go up when I get back from Vegas!

This piece was done at Scar Wars 2 in LA, which was 3, maybe 4 years ago?? Man, time flies….
Anyway, this is what it looks like as of a couple days ago. Brian Decker was working on this piece while I was watching, and holding Sam’s hand, offering my support. He asked if i wanted to help out and I jumped at the chance. We pretty much split the piece down the middle, him working on one side, and myself on the other.

I just received a few more pics from Sam of the work I did on her ribs which I will post later today or tomorrow. And if you are in the Santa Cruz area, you can check out Sam and her boyfriend at their new studio Way Body Arts.