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.

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.

When you think of badass characters from South of the Border, you probably think of two things: Danny Trejo and Brian Decker. Brian had this to say about this hybrid cutting/branding Sugar Skull:

“I’m contemplating completely substituting skin removal with hyfrecator filling, as it’s much quicker and the results are seemingly better, in my opinion”

Another amazing traditional tattoo style cutting by Lewis Dodd. This piece was from tattoo flash by Ralph Johnstone somewhere in the 1950s. I love single line cutting like this; I think that removal would have left this piece a little too unbalanced. The simplicity of the line cutting is subtle for such a bold design.

Lewis just keeps knocking it out of the park.

Claire and I were wandering around yesterday and found one of the getcut.org stickers (featuring art by David Bruehl) on the back of a sign. I haven’t dropped a lot of these in Philly, so I have no idea who threw it up, but it was still awesome to see.

We’ll be putting out a new sticker soon. I have a few of these left if anyone wants a few. Contact me.

Two updates in one day? Crazy.
Taking a sick day today; damn summer flu has me knocked out and in sleep mode. In between naps and movies I’ve been going through old photo albums; these date back approximately 12 years or so. I took them at the South Beach Tattoo Tour that Crowe and Dwyer put on.

I could be remembering incorrectly, but I think this was the first time Steve and I met. At the time (1996-ish) he was making waves doing publicly what a lot of people were doing privately; which made him an enemy of established underground practitioners. At the time I was just getting the SPC site started and was publicizing things people were doing privately, so we were well aware of each other’s reputations when we finally sat down and began a two hour conversation, sitting on the floor of a hotel bar exchanging photographs and ideas… I found him to be effortlessly charming, a bit devilish and amazingly open about his background, his training and his technique.

I directly credit Steve’s ESU branding as a main influence on the newer generation of Scarification artists; his high detail branding (which caused a stir when it was featured in IN THE FLESH, BODY ART and BIZARRE) showed people that you could do more than just dots, chevrons and geometric shapes.

After the break there’s a photo of the finished brand (which took around 10 minutes or less). I photographed the client a few months after the branding was done; hopefully I’ll come across that photo soon!