Rose Cutting by John Joyce

I have a bunch of new work by John Joyce that’s going to be posted over the next several days; tonight’s post is of a traditional style rose cutting. I’m going to be heading up to Mr. Joyce’s for a cutting in the next few weeks, so perhaps we’ll also have a video update!

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.

From Jesse;
This cutting of roses and an hour glass took approximately 6 hours in total on Jason Cain’s ribs. The original design was drawn by one of our tattoo artists here at Thrive Studios, Travis McGregor. It was a real fun piece to do!

Six hours! Jason has my utmost respect for sitting through a piece on his ribs.