SCARWARS

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.

“There’s a random painted highway
And a muzzle of bees
My sleeves have come unstitched
From climbing your tree “-Wilco

This is Tim’s (previously featured) three year old tree cutting by Brian Decker; the shading technique produced really impressive texture. Tim has this to say:

” I didn’t aggravate it much at all during healing, and only kept it covered for about 5 or 6 days. I wanted a subtle scar, and I got one.”

Continue after the jump for fresh and healing photos.

Our friend Rata checked in again with this Japanese tattoo style demon cutting; nice bold lines accentuated with flesh removal and shading techniques. I can’t wait to see this one healed!

Brian Decker just finished up his Austin trip. Birds are the new Octopi.
The pieces (on two different clients) use line cutting, flesh removal and shading techniques.

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.

Here’s an octopus cutting I did during my stay in Berkeley last month. I will be in Austin, TX from October 22 through November 1st. If anyone would like any scarification and/or modification work while I’m down south email me SOON at purebodyarts@gmail.com!