“My recent collaboration with Bud Shark resulted in three images based on classic sailing ships, as seen in traditional American tattoo design. Along with sails, they’re rigged out with trellis forms. Both themes have fascinated me since childhood. The house I grew up in was surrounded by trellises. Our small beachfront town, Corona del Mar, was part of Newport Harbor in Southern California, where I saw many varieties of sailing craft. At ten, when I became transfixed by traditional American tattooing, clipper ships were a strong design component that I drew repeatedly. Later, when I became a professional tattooer, I was able to frequently execute these subjects, a mainstay of Western tattoo tradition.
Recently I’ve returned to these forms in my personal art, making many rapid drawings of these “mashups.” Bud and I selected three of them for this project. In the central work “A Burial at Sea” (a classic phrase on tattoos of ships) I introduced Saint Elmo’s Fire – a weather phenomenon in which luminous plasma is created by a corona discharge from a sharp or pointed object in a strong electric field in the atmosphere (such as those generated by thunderstorms or created by a volcanic eruption). This also could relate to the act of tattooing, with its sharp or pointed tools. Sail on…”
Don Ed Hardy